Northwestern University in Qatar

Turkish television serials' reception among women viewers in rural Türkiye: Gendered and generational readings between younger and older women ABSTRACT This study explores how rural women in Büyükkarabag, a village in western Türkiye, interpret popular Turkish drama serials on national television in relation to local values and moralities surrounding gender roles, honour, family values and motherhood. Through extensive informal conversations, structured and unstruc-tured ethnographic interviews and participant observations, the sociocultural dynamics influencing audience behaviour and attitudes were analysed. The study includes repeated in-depth interviews with 40 women villagers during summer and autumn, 2022. The findings reveal significant differences in the interpretation of Turkish serials between older and younger women, as well as generational conflicts in ideology, and tensions in understanding gender roles and honour. Older women perceive a disconnect between the urban and liberal representation of daily life in Turkish serials and local culture, while younger women view them KEYWORDS television drama rural women generational values gender culture Delivered by Intellect to:

Qurʾān exegesis ( tafsīr ) in African Muslim societies represented the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and public explanation of the Qurʾān was the event that marked the emergence of one of Africa’s most successful Sufi revivals, the “Community of the Flood” of the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). Niasse’s network of knowledge transmission, foregrounding the direct experiential knowledge of God ( maʿrifa bi-Llāh ), continued to emphasize Qurʾān learning, but Niasse’s own recorded Arabic tafsīr demonstrated a shift away from traditional West African sources in this field. Prior understandings of the West African tafsīr discipline locate the fifteenth-century Egyptian Tafsīr al-Jalālayn as the primary influence on West African understandings. But Niasse’s tafsīr exhibits a clear preference for an early eighteenth-century Ottoman multivolume work, Ismāʿīl Ḥaqqī’s “Spirit of Explanation” ( Rūh al-bayān ), one of the most comprehensive summaries of Sufi understandings of the Qurʾān. This paper not only demonstrates the globally-connected nature of Islamic knowledge production in West Africa but also argues that Niasse’s emphasis on gnosis built on the Rūḥ al-bayān to ultimately occasion a noteworthy addition to the existing literary corpus of Qurʾān exegesis.

This study examines the perceptions of authenticity among rural women in the village of Büyükkarabag, located in western Türkiye, in their engagement with the popular Turkish television program Müge Anlı ile Tatlı Sert (commonly known as the Müge Anlı Show). Drawing on social identity theory, the paper explores the concept of authenticity and its connection to local values and beliefs, including class, gender roles, honour, and family values. Ethnographic methods such as informal conversations , structured and unstructured interviews, and participant observations were employed to gain insights into the experiences of 40 adult women villagers during the summer and autumn of 2022. The findings of this study reveal that rural women, spanning different generations, perceive authenticity in their engagement with the Müge Anlı Show through the lens of their local values and beliefs. The show and its host are regarded as providing a voice to the voiceless, and upholding conservative Turkish values, with acts such as crime, adultery, and other illicit behavior seen as indicators of moral decay. However, there are notable generational differences in how authenticity is interpreted. Younger women view the show as challenging societal norms and addressing broader social issues, while older women emphasize the show's role in exposing societal wrongs and reinforcing traditional gender roles.

Within the frameworks of postcolonial analysis and gender studies, focused on the involvement of women in the struggle for independence of Bangladesh in 1971, this article presents and discusses three literary and filmic representations of Bangladesh’s War of Liberation. This analysis combines non-fictional and fictional perspectives and input and clearly confirms that, contrary to popular perceptions of predominantly male war heroes, women also participated in the struggle for independence. Women’s sacrifices and commitment to independence and justice have helped build Bangladesh and strengthen gender equality in the context of Bangladeshi nationalism. The analysis establishes the Bangladeshi Liberation War of 1971 as an aftermath of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. This theme assumes particular importance upon the 50th anniversary of the War of Liberation in 2021 and the 75th anniversary of the Partition in 2022.

With older persons increasingly wanting to age in familiar places, among community and family, their natural habitat, technological innovations greatly facilitate that. IATs are designed to ease the burden on families and healthcare systems while enhancing the quality of life and independent living of persons with dementia. This article questions the readiness of societies to accept the use of IAT with their older loved ones. It outlines some of the key social considerations that should be better understood in order to mitigate the barriers to AT use from an end-user and community perspective. It proposes policy interventions that could enhance the acceptance and use of IAT among older persons, taking into account sociocultural and prevailing attitudes, especially in Arab Muslim societies, while benefiting from global experiences.

Studies suggest that, at the routine level, news beats function as unique “micro-cultures.” Exploring this “particularist” approach in news content, we compare how the interventionist, watchdog, loyal, service, infotainment, and civic roles materialize across 11 thematic news beats and analyze the moderating effect of platforms, ownership, and levels of political freedom on journalistic role performance in hard and soft news. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of 148,474 news items from 37 countries. Our results reveal the transversality of interventionism, the strong associations of some topics and roles, and the limited reach of news beat particularism in the face of moderating variables.

This study is a textual analysis of Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazi's suicide in 2020. Based on a grounded theory approach, qualitative analysis was performed on 23 media articles from Egypt, Lebanon, and the United States, with particular focus on episodic/thematic frames and the stigma/stigma-challenging frames due to their significance in studies about mental illness. The main findings reveal that Egypt had the highest stigma frames coupled with the lowest sympathy theme and the least attack on the Egyptian regime, whereas US and Lebanese outlets displayed high sympathy and vehemently attacked the Egyptian regime. Further, the study explains the findings in relation to country media systems. The significance of the study lies in its analysis of media coverage in three countries to help us understand how Arab and American media discuss the intersection of mental health and queerness in the Arab world. It also enriches the health communication literature as the first study to analyze the framing of the suicide of an Arab woman outside the context of war.

Available historical sources for West Africa's Middle Niger c. 1450–1650 reveal that the ‘indigenous’ (non-Arab) Islamic scholarly class was already a self-conscious, independent social entity long before the clerical revolutions of later centuries. The influence of Muslim scholars was not limited to urban environments like Timbuktu, and clerical elites claimed a number of mostly independent communities throughout West Africa by the end of the sixteenth century. Mostly based on a reading of Arabic texts such as Muḥammad al-Kābarī's Bustān al-fawāʾid (‘Garden of Beneficial Prayers’) in dialogue with the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār and Tārīkh al-Sūdān (‘Timbuktu Chronicles’), this article argues that Muslim scholars were engaged in a spiritual war for independence clearly on display since the beginning of the Songhay empire. Scholarly texts display deep concern for tempering unjust political power and the protection and attraction of women, discourses that reveal a perilous clerical struggle to assert community independence. Later armed jihads were thus not so much a break from earlier traditions of clerical pacificism, they were the natural evolution from this earlier spiritual jihad.

This article examines the fictionalized retelling of a real 2017 controversy, after images proliferated of fans raising the rainbow flag during the Lebanese band Mashrou Leila’s concert in Egypt in solidarity with the band’s openly queer frontman. It examines the Egyptian musalsal or Arabic-language drama serial, ‘Awalem Khafeya, Hidden Worlds and suggests that the program engages in the ‘recoding’ of these events, where violent state crackdowns are restaged to cultivate different affects and feelings around troubled sovereignty. The production is situated within the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian contexts, where the program aired and ‘anti-corruption’ crackdowns betray state anxieties around economic liberalization. The production is analyzed to demonstrate how recoding operates, reflecting the potential for failed recoding platforms and raising new questions about content and territory. Ultimately, the article offers recoding as a diagnostic of power in the digital media age, where nations face a crisis of sovereignty as they articulate themselves in a global media marketplace.

The shifting role of journalism in a digital age has affected long-standing journalistic norms across media platforms. This has reinvigorated discussion on how work in online newsrooms compares to other platforms that differ in media affordances and forms. Still, more studies are needed on whether those differences translate into distinct practices, especially when examining cross-national studies. Based on a content analysis of 148,474 stories produced by 365 media organizations from 37 countries, this article compares the performance of journalistic roles in online newsrooms to three other types of media—TV, radio, and print. The paper analyzes if journalistic roles present themselves differently across platforms, and if these differences are constant or they vary across countries. Results show that there are measurable differences in role performance in online journalism compared to other platforms. Platform had a significant impact, particularly in terms of service and infotainment orientation, while the implementation of roles oriented toward public service was more similar. Additionally, country differences in the relationship between role performance and platforms mainly emerged for roles that enable political influence on news coverage, with differences in the relationship between online vs. traditional platforms appearing to be distinct features of the specific political system.

In this introduction to the special issue Design + Journalism, we present a manifesto about the future of design and journalism. This manifesto discusses the key areas that need attention in order to develop a more robust bridge between design and journalism. The manifesto is structured by the following three notions: (1) Recognizing design contributions in the field; (2) Integrating design into digital journalism studies through cultural shift; and (3) Widening the scope of the journalism design industry-academia interface. First, we argue that design artifacts, requirements, methods, and implications ought to be recognized as scholarly contributions in digital journalism studies. Second, we need a profound cultural shift in digital journalism studies, which entails conceptualizing design as a cultural practice, understanding design as a continuous process of shaping, and updating pedagogical approaches. Third, we argue that transversal integration between academia and industry should be more heterogeneous in terms of geopolitics, cultural norms, and values. A varied set of industries should be engaged beyond North America and Western Europe. We argue that integrating these three aspects in digital journalism studies will strengthen the understanding of design as an integral part of journalism and digital journalism studies.

Countries in the Middle East go to considerable lengths using mass media to try to maintain or improve their images among the U.S. public. The same countries often engage in negative media campaigns in the U.S. against each other, attempting to bring down public support for regional rivals. This study examined diplomatic evaluations of five Middle East countries—rating Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine, Qatar, and UAE as an ally, neutral, or enemy of the U.S.—among a large, representative sample of U.S. adults (N=2,059), and assessed measures of news use, social media use, political partisanship, and demographic variables as predictors of the evaluations. News use and other media use predicted little variance in diplomatic ratings; the strongest predictors of positive ratings of a given country were having rated one or more of the other countries positively also—what we term a “regional halo effect.” A key implication of this study is that attempting to harm public perceptions of a regional rival may be self-defeating for a given country, as negative attitudes toward the former country are associated with poor attitudes toward the latter.

State borders allocate access to basic goods, opportunities, rights, and protections along lines of nationality, race, and gender. However, the discriminatory effects of state borders rarely appear as an issue in the self-understanding of liberal-democratic societies and their political theorizing. In this paper, I explore how the category of nationality has been and continues to be used to exclude people who have been negatively racialized by European colonialism. I draw on a number of studies that reconstruct the colonial history of states' claims to authority over people's movements and over the composition of their populations. The idea of territorial nationalities allowed nation-states, in particular those emerging from the settler colonies and metropoles of European empires, to continue practices of racial ordering without using explicit racial categories. With the help of these studies, I criticize liberal nationalists such as David Miller for appealing to the value of national identities to support a right of states to exclude would-be immigrants. I suggest that using genealogical and phenomenological methods allows us to undermine the default authority that is often accorded to the category of nationality.

Recent research on the newsjunkie trait-intrinsic need for orientation (INFO)-has not yet examined specific kinds of information newsjunkies consume or whether the newsjunkie characteristic predicts outcomes like political knowledge. Study 1 surveyed U.S. adults' (N=2,059) INFO, hard news consumption, soft news consumption, use of partisan outlets FOX News and MSNBC, and use of less-partisan outlets like BBC and NBC. The newsjunkie trait was one of the strongest predictors of hard news consumption (like news about foreign affairs and the economy), after controlling for numerous factors, and it did not predict soft news consumption (news about entertainment, sports etc.). The newsjunkie trait was positively associated with use of both partisan and less-partisan outlets. Study 2 examined U.S. adults'(N=1,054) INFO and political knowledge, while holding constant most of the variables controlled for in Study 1. Despite some evidence from Study 1 that newsjunkies are sophisticated news consumers, INFO did not positively predict political knowledge; the strongest positive predictor of political knowledge was consuming political news, and the only other significant news use correlate was use of FOX News, which was negatively associated with political knowledge. Implications for research on the intrinsic need for orientation, news use, and political outcomes are discussed.

For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development: the success of Turkish television dramas (dizi) in Latin America, the land where the telenovela was born. Drawing from 25 interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 in Argentina, we develop the notion of “entangled proximities” to explain different viewership positionalities. Moreover, we show that audiences adopt a “resigned agency”: they experience pleasure while recognizing the role of market forces. Finally, we build on the cultural proximity theory by arguing that these contemporary audiences are instead driven by a desired proximity with both the past genre of the telenovela and with the past society depicted in it.

Advertising departments in universities worldwide must grapple with a fast-changing industry that continues to redefine itself amid technological change and disruption. It is a reality that has prompted extensive discussion among researchers, educators, administrators, and advertising practitioners. There have been workshops addressing the need to consider the skills and qualifications of the contemporary advertising professor. However, left out of the conversation are the students, and thus their expectations about their instructors remain largely unknown. How do students imagine the ideal advertising professor? What qualities are they looking for? What do they want to learn, and how do they envision their relationship with their advertising professors? We explored students’ mindset using the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), obtaining rich insight into their thoughts, feelings, and expectations about the ideal advertising professor. The study can serve as a tool of reflection for advertising educators about their teaching practices, and of assessment for advertising departments during hiring and promotion.

Many fields and different approaches have undergone a crucial merging of implications and have been co-involved in the developing and/or implementation of the 17-SDGs concepts. However, little has been done on the role of the generation Z who is transforming the workplaces and societies by creating and interpreting trends. The objectives of this research are to provide perspectives from the world about the generation Z participatory role and supporting contribution among their communities to reaching SDGs, and to illustrate their active role in a Futuristic Change-Maker Paradigm. A general review was conducted to explore the existing data on governance mechanisms for SDGs implementation regarding the multi-dimensional layers (social, economic, environmental, health, policies, communication, and technology) of the sustainable development structure that need to be considered in a systemic-sensitive approach. Various channels of youth participation can be associated with different levels of social and communities’ commitment. In this sense, this article; 1) confirms that generation Z could play an active role in utilizing state-of-the-art opportunities to address the established current UN-SDGs agenda, and 2) suggests how communication and science journalism can be conceptualized as a development intervention to go beyond the 2030 SDGs agenda. This study recommends several innovative areas for the integration of generation Z insights and activities as a basis for exploring the potential of this generation to improve communities’ literacy and behaviors about the 17-SDGs. This study ends with a practical and theoretical consideration to build a Futuristic Change-Maker Paradigm that can be extrapolated to other countries in their advance towards sustainability and SMART environmental management.