SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Teaching

Courses Taught

• Contemporary Themes in Media and Religion
• Contemporary Themes in Media and Religion
• Contemporary and Classical Issues in Religion and Media
• Dissertation MA Media in Development
• Dissertation for MA Religion and Media
• Studies in Media, Information Communication Technologies and Development

I have had the pleasure of supervising students researching a wide variety of media-related subjects located in varied national and transnational contexts. Current doctoral students are researching such diverse topics as ethnographic exploration of Indian television news; emotion and/in international news; South African journalism confronts globalization; etc.

Former students include

• Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, Film and Censorship in the Islamic Republic, SOAS/University of London, 2007.
• Mehdi Ghaem, Audience Uses of Video in the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1996
  (President’s Prize for Best Social Science Thesis, Iran; 1997; Lecturer, University of Tehran).
• Patria Roman-Velasquez, Latin Culture in London: From Global to Local 1998 (published as The Making of Latin London, Ashgate, 1999; Lecturer, Dept. of Sociology and Communications, City University, London).
• Liz Poole, British Islam in the Media: Production and Consumption Aspects 2001 (published as Reporting Islam, IBTauris, 2002; Lecturer, Dept of Communication, Staffordshire University).
• Gill Allard, The Welsh Cultural Economy on the Net, 2002 (Lecturer, University of Glamorgan).
• Prasun Sonwalker, Violence as Not Newsworthy: The North-Eastern Provinces in the Indian Press, 2003 (Senior lecturer, University of West of England).

Research

I moved to SOAS as Visiting Professor from the University of Leicester in 2004. While based at Leicester, I was the Director of the Centre for Mass Communication Research from 1992-1999 and its only professor. I took up the first chair in Global Media and Communications at SOAS in 2006.

For the past two decades most of my research work has been in the area of International Communication, increasingly on Globalization, and with a strong feminist orientation. My empirical research has been supported by organizations such as UNESCO, the BBC, the Broadcasting Standards Commission and the ESRC. I have consulted for UNESCO, the British Council, Article 19, the EU and the Council of Europe.

I was elected President of IAMCR (www.iamcr.org) from July 2008 for four years. I am an Associate Member of the UNESCO ORBICOM Network (www.orbicom.uqam.ca). In 2002 I became an elected member of the Royal Society of Arts (www.rsa.org)

My interests include theories of globalization, particularly in relation to gender issues and the changing configurations of the public and private. I have focused on media and processes of socio-political change and democratization in the South, with particular emphasis on the Middle East and Iran. I lived in Iran before, during and after the revolution of 1978 and out of that experience became interested in the role of alternative 'small' media and then the Internet as tools of social movements. My work on Iran continued through an ESRC-funded project that allowed me to focus on the nature of Iranian community and media formations in London, work that lies at the centre of my interest in diasporic communities and transnational media. This connects to a more general focus on issues around race, ethnicity and the media and I have conducted funded research projects on both minority ethnic audiences and minority ethnic media production in the UK.

My interest in communications and social movements has had an international focus, with a specific focus on the dynamics of global feminist politics, solidarity and participation, which is increasingly centred on the Net. I have explored transnational women’s networking and feminist politics as the emergence of global civil society dynamics. I am now writing on the gendered elements of the WSIS process. My interest in the intersection of gender, politics and communication has also had a British focus, involving work on the representation of women politicians.

My recent work on Iran has examined the role of the press as part of an emergent civil society in Iran, the particular role that women play as journalists and editors within the Iranian press environment and the emergence of a dynamic Persian-language blogosphere.

I am part of a large AHRC-funded research project under its “Diasporas” research programme called ‘Tuning In” that focuses on the BBC World Service as a cultural contact zone; www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/

Expertise

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Available for

Regional Expertise

• Near and Middle East

Country Expertise

• Iran

Languages

Publications