The Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ) and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) have announced the launch of the Society for Humanistic Arab Media Studies (SHAMS), a pioneering trilingual scholarly association dedicated to advancing rigorous, multidisciplinary, and humanistic research on Arab media in their social, cultural, and political-economic contexts.
The new joint initiative, supported in part by Carnegie Corporation of New York, is part of Northwestern Qatar’s Arab Information and Media Studies (AIMS) project and builds on the Institute’s long-standing partnership with ACSS. It aims to strengthen humanistic research and knowledge production in the Arab region and foster rigorous, interdisciplinary research that enriches the intellectual landscape of Arab media studies by drawing on a wide range of disciplines. This includes literature, history, and philosophy, media studies, digital humanities, and postcolonial theory.
“Working with ACSS has shown us just how powerful trilingualism can be in creating connected, overlapping scholarly publics,” said Marwan M. Kraidy, dean and CEO of Northwestern Qatar. “With SHAMS, we are building on that idea; not just to promote research on Arab media, but to bring together a multilingual network of scholars who have deep expertise about the region. What excites me most is that SHAMS will be a space led by scholars, grounded in the Arab world, and committed to critical thinking from the South about their region. It’s exactly the kind of initiative we envisioned when we launched the AIMS project—and I can’t wait to see how it grows.”
The initiative was launched at the ACSS’ seventh conference in Beirut, where the Institute led a scholarly discussion under the conference theme “Devastation, Imaginaries and Knowledge: Regional Junctures and Global Repercussions.” Faculty and scholars from across the Northwestern Qatar community showcased a wide range of scholarly works. This includes an analysis of televised representations of youth in Guinea by Clovis Bergère, director of #IAS_NUQ, and three film screenings curated by associate professor Rana Kazkaz and #IAS_NUQ Global Postdoctoral Scholar Chafic Najem.
“With SHAMS, we are building on that idea; not just to promote research on Arab media, but to bring together a multilingual network of scholars who have deep expertise about the region. What excites me most is that SHAMS will be a space led by scholars, grounded in the Arab world, and committed to critical thinking from the South about their region.”
As part of the conference program, Dean Kraidy chaired a panel on Arab digitalities, exploring how digital technologies are shaping everyday life across the Arab region. The panel brought together research on the intersections of media, politics, and lived experience. Panelists included Najem, who presented “Buying Time: Regimes of Temporal Capital and the Telecommunication Vortex of Lebanon,” Leila Tayeb, assistant professor in residence at Northwestern Qatar, who discussed “Arab Drones: Being (Targeted) and Listening,” and Nermin El Sherif, assistant professor in residence at Utrecht University, who examined “Controlling ‘Live’: Internet Trends, Media Panics, and the Social Reproduction of a Silent Nation.”
In another session, scholars explored how the “digital” can be conceptualized and studied within an InterAsia framework. Panelists included Harsha Man Maharjan, a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at #IAS_NUQ, who proposed a transregional approach to national ID systems in his presentation, “An InterAsian Digitalities Framework: A Proposal for National Digital Identification Studies”; Ada Petiwala, assistant professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut, who examined how digital narratives of tolerance obscure structural violence in “India-UAE-Israel: Tolerance/Violence in the New Middle East Order”; and Mariam Karim, also a Global Postdoctoral Scholar at #IAS_NUQ, who offered a feminist intervention into digital archival practices in her talk, “Towards a Feminist Definition of ‘InterAsian Digitalities’: Nazrah Arabyya.”
As part of the conference, leaders from #IAS_NUQ and ACSS also convened to chart the next phase next chapter of the InterAsia Partnership, a network committed to reconceptualizing Asia as a dynamic and interconnected formation and to serving as a vital platform for transregional dialogue, collaborative scholarship, and the development of new theoretical frameworks that reflect the complexities of Asia in a global context.
The partnership between #IAS_NUQ and ACSS began in 2022 with the launch of the Critical Security Studies (CSS) hub in Qatar and has since grown into a dynamic collaboration that broadens regional dialogue and opens new pathways for knowledge production from and about the Arab world. With SHAMS now offering a dedicated home for humanistic Arab media studies, and the InterAsia Partnership entering a new phase of transregional engagement, the Institute continues to drive forward inclusive, interdisciplinary scholarship from the Arab region and the wider Global South.
