Christina Slade - Dean of Arts and Sciences,City University

Wednesday 17^th March 2010, 5pm – 6.30pm

Founders West 101

This paper deals with the case of Arabic speakers in the EU, and the results of a seven nation (FP7 funded) enquiry into the ways they use Arabic television and its impact on their identities as citizens of the EU. In the EU Arabic speakers have access to a wide range of transnational television, as well as hundreds of rebroadcast national television channels. Our study is the first broadly based quantitative and qualitative study of these audiences, and raises fundamental questions about the new landscapes of cultural citizenship in the EU. This paper addresses both descriptive and analytic problems that have arisen from the data. How do we describe super (and sub-) national public spheres of this sort, and how do we analyse that data? Some of the conclusions were unexpected:  some communities are primarily bicultural (or translocal) watching local media from the their two nations of belonging, while others engage with  transnational media in Arabic, English and other languages and develop a more archetypally  ‘cosmopolitan’ viewpoint. Paradoxically it is those who travel regularly to their country of origin who are often bicultural, while refugees, students and others more firmly rooted in the EU are transnational in view.

Christina Slade is Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at City University London. She was Dean of Humanities at Macquarie University from 2003-8 and has taught at a number of universities including Universiteit Utrecht, as Professor of Media Theory, New York University, La Universidad Ibero Americana and the ITESM, in Mexico City. Her research interests range from issues in the philosophical foundations of communication theory, through issues of the global public sphere and its fragmentation under the impact of new technologies to questions relating to the development of reasoning skills using television product. She leads a seven nation EU-funded FP7 project entitled Media & Citizenship: Transnational Television Cultures: Reshaping Political Identities in the European Union.

For further information about the seminar please contact Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk.



Andrew Chadwick (Royal Holloway) and James Stanyer (Communication and Media, Loughborough University) will be presenting a paper, "Political Communication in Transition: Mediated Politics in Britain’s New Media Environment" at the UK Political Studies Association's 60th Anniversary Conference at Edinburgh, March 29-April 1, 2010.

The paper is part of a panel on "New Media and Democracy" sponsored by the PSA's Media and Politics Section.

The final schedule is due to be published in January 2010.

The Political Studies Association annual conference for 2010 will be held in Edinburgh on 29 March - 1 April. Ben O'Loughlin will take part on a panel 'communicating terror' organised by Piers Robinson at the University of Manchester. Combining arguments from the forthcoming book on Diffused War (with Andrew Hoskins) and the NPCU's work on strategic narratives, the paper will examine how different actors are getting to grips with communication nearly five years on from the 7/7 London bombings.

At the time, digitization was creating dynamics of emergence; a residual contingency due to the potential for images and other media content to emerge at unforeseen times to disrupt settled narratives. The BBC invited a deluge of mobile phone images on the day of 7/7, but also faced the prospect of 'counter'-images or evidence later emerging that would contradict the narrative emerging on the day of the attacks (creating problems that BBC World's Nik Gowing has explored). Recently, political leaders’ strategies have switched from directing information flows to harnessing the ‘flux’ of user-generating content around terrorism. But will control of the diffuse simply generate another set of dynamics?