Short Abstract:

This roundtable discusses the influence of Faye Ginsburg’s scholarship and institution-building in visual and media anthropology on ethnographers of media practices and cultural activism in Southwest Asia and North Africa, the region conventionally called the Middle East.

Long Abstract:

The reach of Faye Ginsburg’s work as well as her mentorship and institutional-building through NYU’s Program in Culture & Media has shaped visual and media anthropology across diverse geographic regions and areas of ethnographic inquiry. Ginsburg’s scholarship has spanned topics from reproductive politics to Indigenous self-determination to the transformative effects more accessible worlds can have on the lives of people with disabilities. A key theme uniting her diverse body of work has been both on how to take seriously media-making as a form of cultural activism across anthropological field sites and on the ways in which anthropologists’ own media forms and representations can embed a decolonizing ethos attuned to the lived concerns, creative agency and desired futures of our anthropological interlocutors.

This roundtable brings Ginsburg in conversation around this theme with several generations of her students working ethnographically on media practices and cultural activism in SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa), a term that more broadly encompasses what is often referred to as the Middle East. Whether it is revolutionary comics, nostalgic animations or engaged documentary film in Egypt, collaborative media production in Palestine, disability activism in Iran, subaltern struggles for media justice in Afghanistan or the politics of TV ratings in Turkey, Ginsburg research provokes a parallax effect: the ability to see differently – and thus act otherwise – by shifting position. As communities and peoples in the SWANA region continue to suffer the deadly degradations of Western structural and epistemic violence, this effect remains urgent and necessary.

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