Helga Tawil-Souri

Helga is a media scholar who focuses on spatiality, technology, and politics in the Middle East and especially Israel/Palestine, and methodologically incorporates political economy, visual and cultural studies, and cultural geography. Broadly, her work critiques the notion that we live in an increasingly open and borderless world, by analyzing how technologies and their infrastructures - such as cell phones and the internet - are explicitly territorial and political and often impose new forms of borders and controls. On the flip side of that, she is equally fascinated by how spaces and 'things' that are overtly territorial and political - borders, checkpoints, and identification cards, for example - themselves function in cultural ways. Most of her teaching is through the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on topics including borders and spatiality; Arab media; critical theory and media studies; infrastructure studies; Israel/Palestine; war and media; globalization, international development, and commodities.