Joe F. Khalil is an associate professor of global media in residence at Northwestern University Qatar. His research focuses on changes and continuities in media, with a particular emphasis on Middle East youth. He takes an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to understanding
mainstream and alternative media, probing media industries, production studies, social movements, and digital cultures. His books include The Digital Double Bind, Arab Television Industries, and Arab Satellite Entertainment Television and Public Diplomacy. He is co-editor of The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East and Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World. In addition to his academic work, Khalil remains active in professional media production and consulting, and is frequently featured as a media commentator.
His project this year, “Youth Generated Media: A Cultural Politics of Arab Youth,” offers fresh insights into the relationship between media and youth through the prism of youth generated media, which is define as the communicative ways in which youth actively negotiate the social, political, and cultural power spheres of everyday life with the intense excitement of young, dynamic movements. Drawing from a rich collection of primary ethnographic, textual, and visual sources that Dr. Khalil has gathered over 15 years, this project investigates the compelling story of how and why Arab youth engage in the development and circulation of various forms of media (both online and offline). It tells the contemporary, vivid stories of car-drifting video makers, digital activists, video collectives, rappers, and social movement actors operating locally in Lebanon, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia, as well as trans-locally, particularly in Europe and the United States.
To arrange a meeting with Dr. Khalil, please contact IPDGC: ipdgc@gwu.edu