Digital Forays: Digital Data Gathering & Changing Ways of Knowing II: Social Media Afterlives

Digital Forays in Middle Eastern Studies // A year-long series 2020-2021:

This year-long series starts from a simple premise: What does it look like to think, engage, and do research in this digital age?  This is not a call for researchers to simply produce digital outputs - but we live in an ever-increasingly digital world. In order to better activate our scholarship, and to grasp the terrain in which our research questions unfold, we must reimagine our methods, modes of collaboration, and how to participate in a quickly changing digital landscape. See full series overview

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DIGITAL DATA GATHERING & CHANGING WAYS OF KNOWING II:
SOCIAL MEDIA AFTERLIVES

March 18, 2021 / 12:30-2PM (NYC/EST Time) / Zoom signup

At the time of writing, the US Capitol was just stormed by Trump supporters. Americans are glued to TikToKs, Tweets, Live Streams, & social media posts that nearly synchronously take millions into the events as they unfold. Yet these posts are also being saved, aggregated, cross referenced, processed by computer vision - and will linger on as evidence. 

This panel assembles social media researchers & scholars to speak about data collection and the afterlives of what happens across social media once hitting post/upload. Researchers may mine Twitter, others might do sentiment analysis, or utilize location data - yet how are these applications, which become siphon and sleeves of our digital social lives, also changing how/what we know in various MIddle Eastern countries? What insights can we glean from the afterlives of social media that constructs a digital background of our lives? This is not just to address usage and penetration, but the social implications and deeper entwinements of these media into layers of society.  This panel is about longevity, ephemerality, and the digital afterlives of moments, photos, and phrases which “prove,” “show” and “create” realities. 

Join the Kevorkian Center with Yakein Abdelmagid, Marc Owen Jones, Marlene Schäfers, and discussant Adel Iskandar on March 18, 2021 at 12:30 pm (EST) to think through these questions and discuss together issues of platforms and publics. To register please follow the link here or copy and paste the link to your browser: bit.ly/NYUKevoDF318

Before joining Big Sky, Dr. Yakein Abdelmagid founded the Media Ethnography Lab at The Center for Advanced Research in Global Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; led research projects at The Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University; and managed cross-cultural research at The Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute in Egypt. He leveraged research outcomes to design business strategies at Vibe Studios leading business growth that transformed the studio into the flagship of the indie music scene in Egypt.  Driven by curiosity that leverages research and analysis for transformative change, Yakein is passionate for grounded knowledge that leads to deeper empathetic understanding. As a seasoned cultural broker, Yakein excels in bringing together diverse people to collaborate in global, cross-functional, and cross-cultural teams.  As an educator committed to collaborative learning, Yakein organized 12+ international academic workshops and conferences; taught undergraduate and graduate seminars on global economies, creative industries, and qualitative research at Duke University, Bryn Mawr College, University of the Arts, and George Washington University. He is an avid gardener and plant lover: Yakein believes that we can learn a lot about growth, hope, collaboration, and resilience from fellow plants!

He spent much of his childhood in Bahrain, and has also lived in various parts of the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria. Prior to joining HBKU, he won a Teach at Tubingen Award at Tuebingen University’s Institute for Political Science, and worked as a Lecturer in the History of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula at Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies.  He has edited two books, and recently published a  monograph on political repression in Bahrain with Cambridge University Press. His current work focuses largely on disinformation on social media in the Middle East, and he is currently working on his next book, Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, published with Hurst/OUP (2021). In addition to his academic work, he enjoys communicating his research to broader audiences, and has bylines in the Washington Post, New Statesman, CNN, the Independent, PEN International, and several others. He has also appeared frequently on the BBC, Channel 4 News, and Al Jazeera.

She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Research Group at Ghent University, Belgium. Her work has been published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies and Social Anthropology. She is co-editor of a special issue on loyalty and critique in resistance movements (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020) and associate editor of the journal Kurdish Studies. In May 2021 she will deliver the Evans-Pritchard Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford. 

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to kevorkian.center@nyu.edu by March 11, 2020. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests. A captioned version of this presentation will also be made available within a month to our Youtube page.

Also be advised that this Zoom event will be recorded and made available after the event on our Youtube page.

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