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This seminar introduces key concepts for understanding gender, representation, and empowerment in the age of digital media. Women from war-torn regions such as Syria are frequently portrayed in English-language media and scholarship as passive victims in need of rescue, while refugee men are often framed as threatening figures or potential security risks. These reductive and racialized representations erase historical, political, and social agency, while reinforcing global hierarchies between the Global North and the Global South. The course examines how marginalized communities—particularly Syrian women—challenge and resist these dominant narratives by strategically using digital media to reclaim agency, assert dignity, and foster collective empowerment. Through intersectional and decolonial feminist frameworks, participants will critically explore how media representations are shaped by race, gender, coloniality, war, and migration.
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 Presented by The New University in Exile Consortium at The New School for Social Research.
By joining this online event, you will be prompted to accept Zoom Terms of Service. If the session is recorded, you acknowledge that by participating, your name, phone number, and profile picture might be visible to the public. You can customize your personal information when creating your Zoom account. The New School may use any recorded material from the event.
Dr Ahmad Barakat has policy expertise in the politics of the Middle East. He is a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham. His research examines the politics of the Middle East with focus on the political economy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab Spring, the refugee crisis and media, ISIS, Islamism, and extremism. His work has appeared in a number of leading journals such as Oxford, Routledge, and the University of St. Andrews. He is a former Syrian diplomat, UN staff, and human rights expert.
Dr. Katty Alhayek is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. Alhayek’s research centers around themes of marginality, media, audiences, gender, intersectionality, and displacement in a transnational context. Alhayek completed her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the United States of America with a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies.
The New University in Exile Consortium regularly offers a series of free, 10-week, co-led online seminars. The seminars are taught by two endangered scholars – one who is hosted by a Consortium member institution, and the other a colleague of their choice. The seminars are designed to reconnect endangered scholars with the academic community they have lost while in exile and reengage students from around the world with professors they have lost. They are free and open to anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
To learn more and register visit our Fall 2026 Hub, Linked Here!
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