#IAS_NUQ Global Postdoctoral Scholar Colloquium
Northwestern University in Qatar
Education City, Qatar +974 4454 5100
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This colloquium draws from Chafic Najem’s ongoing book project Illicit Media, which conceptualizes illicitness as a political condition shaping how media is produced, circulated, and received in carceral spaces. Focusing on cellphone smuggling and the covert use of digital technologies in Lebanon’s prisons, the project explores the creative, political, and testimonial potential of media practices forged under constraint.
The talk introduces one of the book’s central concepts: digital carceral mobilities, which are paradoxical forms of embodied, spatio-temporal, and mediated mobility enabled by smuggled phones and clandestine digital networks. Najem examines how prisoners use these technologies to document lived experiences and negotiate restrictions on movement, even as these tools remain entangled in systems of surveillance, socio-economic inequality, and a deteriorating carceral infrastructure. Illicit Media proposes a shift toward understanding media from the prison as a critical inquiry into the expressive practices of incarcerated individuals and the imaginaries they bring into being.
Chafic Najem is a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ). He received his PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Stockholm University and holds a post-master’s degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Sweden. He completed both his MA and BA at the American University of Beirut.
Najem’s research focuses on prisoners’ illicit media practices and the smuggling and use of digital technologies in carceral spaces, particularly in Lebanon. His work engages questions of social movements and mobilization, media witnessing and amateur-recorded testimonies, and visual culture in relation to carceral politics. His scholarship spans media and communication studies, documentary studies, and artistic research, with recent publications in Media, Culture & Society and Panoptikum. Prior to joining NU-Q, he held teaching appointments at Stockholm University, Uppsala University, and Södertörn University. His postdoctoral research is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York through the Institute’s Arab Information and Media Studies (AIMS) project.
DATE
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
TIME
1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
LOCATION
Room 1-300