AIMS Conference 2003

New Media and Public Debates in the Maghreb

July 3-6

If you would like to participate in the conference this year, please submit a paper abstract (if you not have not done so already) by May 1, 2003. Announcement of participants will be May 6.

Call for Papers:

New media, actors and debates in the Maghreb have, in the past decade, radically changed the terms and reach of public discourse, scandals, cultural production, collective identities, political alliance and participation. New media cannot be understood narrowly in terms of information technologies adapted from the West (the impact of the Internet on Algerians). Nor can the increasingly transnational scope of public debates be understood as a straightforward effect of globalization – typically conceived as an unstoppable force from the outside. Rather, sites of production and transformation of media and public discourses include and are often centered in the Maghreb. This year's AIMS conference seeks to explore how new media and public debates in the Maghreb create and are created by new forms of political consciousness, intervention and upheaval; displacement and social exclusion; civil society; social redistribution; state power, surveillance, and official discourse; parochialism; collective amnesia and memory; Islamism; feminism; internationalism; cultural production, consumption, and recognition. The purpose of the conference is to critically engage and theorize specific, researched examples.

Submissions (in Arabic, French or English): 300-word abstract by May 1; 10-page paper, double-spaced, by June 15 to jenine.abboushi@nyu.edu The conference will be in Oran, Algeria.