Spring 2025
In academic careers, research and creative activities are sometimes viewed as metrics to be fulfilled, with a focus on quantity over quality, rather than as an essential component of our work as teachers, colleagues, and professionals. Though at an institution like Northwestern a minimum number of scholarly and creative accomplishments is a normative expectation, our focus must remain on the quality of our contributions. Being well-published—a few well-crafted pieces, offering new insights or approaches to major issues, placed in highly competitive, broadly read outlets—has a deeper, broader, and more enduring impact that publishing many pieces of uneven quality in a mix of excellent and lesser outlets. This applies to scholarship disseminated in words, images, sounds, or pixels. The idea is to be an active participant in conversations that are shedding light on enduring issues or emergent questions, and therefore, that shape field of inquiry. At Northwestern Qatar we are committed to providing the resources and mentoring that enable us to make original and enduring contributions to knowledge globally.
This year’s Research and Creative Scholarship Newsletter continues to highlight the scholarly excellence of our NU-Q faculty. Since May of 2024, faculty have produced four books, a film, a podcast series, a number of new video game platforms, thirty-nine peer-reviewed journal articles, forty scholarly book chapters, a number of journalism pieces and other forms of public scholarship. They have also won prestigious awards, with highlights including Marwan Kraidy’s election as chair of the Board of Directors for the American Council of Learned Societies, Venus Jin’s induction as an International Communication Association Fellow, Sami Hermez’s Prose Award in the Humanities from the Association of American Publishers, Joao Queiroga’s Docs for Sale selection at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, and Spencer Striker’s Bronze Medal, Immersive Experiential Education Award at the QS Reimagine Education Awards. Faculty have also presented at more than 120 international conferences and invited lectures or film screenings, including prestigious scholarly gatherings such as the International Communication Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the International Media Management Academic Association, the Middle East Studies Association, the African Studies Association, and the American Sociological Association. They have also given talks at peer universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, Georgetown, New York University Abu Dhabi, Oxford, and the University of London, and presented in diverse locations in the Global South, such as Iraq, Palestine, India, Chile, Egypt, and Guinea. Faculty Affairs thanks the NU-Q Library for their assistance in compiling and verifying citations, as well as the Communication and Public Affairs department for assistance in publication.
Zachary Wright
Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs
As #IAS_NUQ transitioned into its fourth year, it continued its upward trajectory toward becoming a leading institute for research on the Global South. Having laid a solid foundation, this year #IAS_NUQ staff focused on improvement and refinement of core programs and fellowships, while introducing new and targeted initiatives relevant to our mission.
In 2024-2025, #IAS_NUQ welcomed 4 Global Fellows. Ratnamala Vanamamalai (Mizoram University), Sagnik Dutta (Tilburg University), Chikezie Uzuegbunam (Rhodes University), and Patrick Murphy (Temple University) all spent between 1-2 months in residence at NU-Q working on publication projects, participating in #IAS_NUQ research and writing groups, presenting their work to the Education City community, and generally contributing to the intellectual life of the Institute. In their second year, our 3 Postdoctoral Scholars Mariam Karim, Chafic Najem, and Harsha Maharjan each continued developing their own research agendas, teaching one undergraduate course each, submitting to top-tier academic journals, presenting at major conferences, and supporting several #IAS_NUQ initiatives.
The #IAS_NUQ Global Undergraduate Fellow program continues to thrive. The 2024 cohort completed their fellowships in January, showcasing their projects at a major community celebration which was attended by over 150 guests. They presented 9 research papers, 5 films, and 2 multimodal projects on topics including TikTok use Pakistan, citizen journalism in Nepal, religion in Brazil, historical memory in Pakistan, and digital news access in Zambia. The 2025 cohort also began work in January, and the 16 fellows are now busy preparing to conduct fieldwork over the summer. Over the past year, several #IAS_NUQ Global Undergraduate Fellows and alums have presented their projects at top academic conferences and film festivals and have been accepted into prestigious graduate programs.
Last summer, #IAS_NUQ expanded its global reach with a major presence at the annual conferences of both the International Communication Association (ICA) and the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). At ICA, #IAS_NUQ scholars contributed to a total of 13 sessions and 17 individual slots. The Institute also sponsored two preconferences: “Repressed Histories of Communication and Media Studies” and “Arab Communications Studies: Towards A Renewed Research Agenda.” Our delegation included two student researchers, Abenezer Bekele and In'utu Imbuwa, who presented their #IAS_NUQ undergraduate fellowship projects, “Exploring the Factors That Affect the Adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI)” and “Watermelon Politics and Chitenge in Zambia,” respectively. At IAMCR, #IAS_NUQ had a similarly robust presence, showcasing #IAS_NUQ researchers, postdoctoral scholars, and global undergraduate fellows. Our student researchers Sudesh Baniya and Sylvie Dushime presented "After the Hippies Were Gone: The Remnants of Countercultural Interactions in Nepal," and "Ikinamico: Cultural Continuity Through a Mediated Anthological Radio Drama." #IAS_NUQ is now actively preparing for an expanded roster of activities at each of these conferences this year.
The public events program shifted gears to highlight research by IAS Postdoctoral Scholars and Global Fellows, featuring 7 community colloquia in 2024-2025. #IAS_NUQ also presented its second annual NU-Q Lecture on the Global South in January by Bilge Yesil (City University of New York) titled “How (Not) to Decolonize: Theorizing Media and Communication from the Global South.” While at NU-Q, Yesil offered two publication workshops and a mentoring session with undergraduate fellows. In October, as part of our AIMS project, #IAS_NUQ held a scholarly roundtable with the Security in Context (SiC) network titled “Multilateralism from the Margins: Mapping Challenges, Contestations, and Prospects for Cooperation and Solidarity in Global Interactions.” The two-day event featured two public panels and resulted in the publication of a report co-published by SiC and #IAS_NUQ. In addition, #IAS_NUQ cosponsored two external events: a two-day conference on “Youth and the Digital” at the Université de Labé in Guinea in February and a virtual workshop entitled “Attaching Affects,” co-organized by Heather Jaber, assistant professor at NU-Q and cosponsored by the Society for the Study of Affect.
IAS_NUQ continues to support NU-Q faculty scholarship via our #IAS_NUQ Global South Research Grant and the #IAS_NUQ Conference and Workshop Grant. This semester, we completed work on Chaos Corp., a collaborative, cross-platform learning game project designed to teach digital literacy and critical thinking to Filipino youth led by Spencer Striker, associate professor of digital media design at NU-Q, and Katrina Paola B. Alvarez, assistant professor of game studies at De La Salle University. The game – designed to enhance youth people’s ability to make sense of disinformation, fake news, and the role of press freedom – was successfully launched in English, Tagalog, and Arabic at the Qatar Web Submit in February. We welcome applications for both opportunities on a rolling basis.
The IAS Arab Information and Media Studies (AIMS) project funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York was renewed for $500,000 late last year. Under the direction of Dean Marwan M. Kraidy and the management of #IAS_NUQ, the grant is now supporting capacity building through academic workshops, networking, conferences, and dissemination of academic papers and policy briefs. The first major activity under the renewed grant was a Theory and Method Winter School which took place in January 2025 focused on "Arab and Southern Digitalities." The winter school included 3 master classes on Environmental Humanities, Epistemic Decolonization of Digital Media, and Historical Methods, and provided 12 early careers scholars feedback on their current research projects. We have also recently renewed our partnership with the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS) to support programming for Critical Security Studies and InterAsian Digitalities and launched a new partnership with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) to engage with public history practices on the international level, emphasizing academic approaches to public history and digital perspectives and methodologies from the Global South.
The past year witnessed a transformative chapter for the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern Qatar, under the leadership of Alfredo Cramerotti. In Fall 2024, the museum launched The Limits of my language are the limits of my world, curated by Northwestern Qatar alumna Amal Zeyad Ali, exploring the profound ways language shapes identity, media, and culture. As part of the exhibition programming, we partnered with Afikra to host a public symposium on Arabic storytelling in AI, film, and media, fostering critical conversations among regional experts and young audiences alike.
In January 2025, the museum unveiled Ai or NAY? Artificial vs. Intelligent, curated by Jack Thomas Taylor, a major exhibition examining the shifting relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence.
Alongside these exhibitions, the Media Majlis Museum expanded its regional and global impact by co-hosting the 53rd annual IKT Congress with NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery—marking the Congress’s first-ever edition in the Gulf region.
In February 2025, the museum celebrated a major milestone of its fifth anniversary by showcasing its journey and achievements at Web Summit Qatar with a dynamic digital mural and hosted key discussions on the future of media storytelling and technological innovation.
Throughout the year, The Media Majlis Museum continued to deepen its commitment to public engagement, academic integration, and cross-cultural dialogue, further establishing itself as a next-generation museum at the intersection of media, communication, art, and technology.”
The inaugural year of the AIM-lab witnessed many exciting iniatives. Public engagement opportunities included AIM-lab presentations at the Web Summit Qatar 2025. The AIM-lab lecture series NU-Q community discussions, moderated by AIM-Lab Director Venus Jin, on topics such as “AI for a better world” (with Spencer Striker and Zaid Almahmoud), “From Modelling to Mitigation: Detecting and First Responding to Hate Speech and Disinformation” (with Marc Owen Jones and Wajdi Zaghouani), and “AI-Empowered Future of Writing and Writing Instruction” (with David Kaufer and Suguru Ishizaki).
The AURORA student grant – designed to mentor undergraduate researchers, nuture future media professionals and academics, and expand meaningful contributions to the global discourse on AI – was awarded to three NU-Q students. The AIM-lab also had the opportunity to host a postdoctoral scholar, Zaid Almahmoud, who recently received his PhD in applied machine learning for cybersecurity from Birkbeck, University of London. In addition to furthering his research and serving as a core AIM-lab affiliate, Almahmoud has been contributing the curriculum development, collaborating with the AI and Media Minor, and teaching an NU-Q course on Python and Artificial Intelligence.
