Chafic Najem

Chafic Tony Najem is an Assistant Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar with a joint appointment across Communication and Liberal Arts programs. 

He received his PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Stockholm University and completed post-master’s studies in Artistic Research at the Royal Institute of Art in Sweden. He holds an MA and a BA from the American University of Beirut.

Before joining the faculty at NU-Q, Najem held a Postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at NUQ (#IAS_NUQ) and teaching positions at Stockholm University, Uppsala University, and Södertörn University.

Najem’s research lies at the intersection of media and communication studies, documentary studies, and critical theory. His work examines clandestine and informal media practices, the politics of images, and historical-materialist approaches to media technologies.

His current research focuses on prisoners’ illicit media practices and the smuggling, circulation, and use of digital media technologies in carceral spaces, particularly in Lebanon. More broadly, his work asks how illicit and improvised media practices emerging under conditions of constraint and precarity become forms of political mobilization and testimony, while negotiating the temporal, spatial, and visual conditions of political life.

His scholarship has appeared in Time & Society; Mobile Media & Communication; Communication, Culture & Critique; MERIP; Media, Culture & Society; and Panoptikum.

Alongside his academic research, Chafic has experience in television production and documentary filmmaking and maintains an active artistic practice.