News and Events:
Archive:
Informing Revolutions: the Role of Social Media
Scholarly Communication Center
Alexander Library
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
10 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Refreshments will be served
Recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have shed new light on the significance of
social media and other systems of communication and political participation. A panel of
distinguished Rutgers researchers will examine social media in the context of the politics of
information and its relation to the seismic transformations in society.
Sponsored by the Rutgers University Libraries, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.
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Moderator:
Jane Sloan, Rutgers University Media Librarian.
Panelists:
Golbarg Bashi. Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Iran: The First Twitter Revolution.
Fakhri Haghani, Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Sounds of the Revolution.
Tarek Kahloaoui. History and Art History Department, Rutgers University. The Tunisian Revolution: A Facebook Revolution?
Deepa Kumar. SC&I, Communication and Media Studies: The Power of Images: Women in Revolution.
PANELISTS
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Golbarg Bashi is transnational feminist scholar of modern Iran, with a specific interest in
postcolonial studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University in
the City of New York and has been teaching Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers
University since 2009. Her doctoral dissertation was feminist critique of the human rights
discourse in Iran. Dr. Bashi's current research interests include: Political art and music in
Iran, representations of gender, race and Muslims in popular culture and women's rights
movements in Iran and in global comparative context. Her latest publication is a chapter in the
newly released and widely celebrated The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle
for Iran's Future (Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, Eds.) Melville House, 2011.
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Fakhri Haghani is a faculty member of the Center for the Middle Easter Studies at Rutgers.
Originally from Iran, she is an interdisciplinary scholar that works on questions of gender and
women's movements, popular culture and political art in cinema and music/performing arts, as
well as visual and literary representations, and social and intellectual history as multi-
faceted manifestations of the contested identities in Iran and other societies of the Middle
East. Dr. Haghani has served as a co-chair and a co-founding member of the Human Rights
Atlanta, an activist branch of Center for Human Rights Education in Atlanta, committed to
promoting human rights education as a framework for social change in regard to the contested
issues of immigration, race, and ethnic diversity within the United States. She holds an
advanced degree in Art History from Facolta di Magistero at University of Rome (Sapienza) in
Italy, M.A. in Women's Studies and a Ph.D. in History from Georgia State University.
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Tarek Kahlaoui is an assistant professor with the Department of Art History and History at
Rutgers. He also serves as the assistant director of Rutgers' Program in Cultural Heritage and
Preservation Studies. He received his PhD in 2008 from the University of Pennsylvania on the
Islamic representations of the Mediterranean. His research and teaching focus on the art
history of the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Kahlaoui was active in the student movement in
Tunisia in the 1990s and was banned from leaving the country until 2000. He has been a leading
figure recently in the anti-censorship movement in Tunisia ("Sayyeb Sale7") and was very active
in disseminating the information throughout the net (especially via Facebook and Twitter)
during the Tunisian Revolution. He was interviewed in Al-Jazeera TV Channel and Al-Hiwar TV
Channel and writes frequently in Arabic about politics in Al-Jazeera.net, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, and
Middle East Online.
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Deepa Kumar an associate professor of Media Studies at Rutgers, is also affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies. Her areas of research include media, war, and imperialism;
media, globalization, and class; media and gender; and Islam, the Middle East and U.S. foreign
policy, on which she has published several scholarly articles. Her first book is titled
Outside
the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike (University of Illinois Press,
2007). She is currently working on a second book on political Islam, US policy, and the news. Dr.
Kumar has been active in various social movements for peace and justice and she writes
regularly for alternative media such as MR Zine, Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, Islamophobia-
Watch, ISR etc. She has also lectured widely on this topic and has been interviewed by numerous
media outlets including BBC, USA Today, China Radio International, Proseco (Mexico), The Robert
F. Kennedy, Jr. radio program Ring of Fire, etc.
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