Recognising the limits of the conventional global framework for sustainable development policies, the UN has recently accorded "culture" a central status in its universal vison for transformative development. However, many experts have voiced concern that the use of culture as a development strategy has not generated adequate community-based indictors for meaningful sustainability. Furthermore, the promotion and incorporation of culture into sustainable development strategies has largely and ambiguously remained within the confines of neo-liberal globalisation discourse. This article aims to examine the limits of culture-based sustainable development in the GCC region, as expressed in UN-inspired national development visions.
The aim of this article is to examine the persistent charterer of orientalist discourse in western mass media narratives by analysing the function of the ‘native subject’ and ‘native attitude’ in the constitution of neo-orientalism. While the classical orientalist representational vision has dominated the western media and popular narratives of Islam and Arabs throughout the twentieth century, it is the contention of this article that new forms and formations of orientalist discourse have emerged corresponding with the West’s new imperial designs in the post-Cold War era and especially during the so-called ‘War on Terror’. The rise of these neo-orientalist strategies in the western media finds its elaborate articulation in the deployment of ‘native subjects’ as specialists who provide a crucial function in facilitating oriental discourse for the service of hegemonic (military and cultural) ideology. Relying on interpretive discourse analysis, this article will illustrate how a serious engagement with current orientalist media ideology warrants a critical examination of the ways its new strategies have mutated to include the native as a source for its ideological narratives. Whereas in classical orientalist narratives the ‘oriental native’ had indispensably occupied central status as the ‘object’ of ‘authentic’ oriental knowledge, in the neo-orientalist discourse the ‘native’ becomes the ‘voice/authority’ of the reorientalized native cultures.
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Conceptualizing the social and political possibilities of digital mass-mediated communication in modern societies has generated a critical debate, ranging from proponents who conceive of its promising profound potential to sceptics who dismiss it as a trivial sociopolitical vacuity. For some observers in the field, social media has been mobilized to maintain hegemonic structures through a ‘weaponization’ of popular narratives on behalf of the dominant political elite. For others, social media discourse has signalled the end of grand narratives of political ideology, and has ultimately ushered in the age of subjective digital narcissism not unlike that of consumer culture in late capitalist societies. Beyond these two broader frameworks of inquiry, this article seeks to investigate the critical agency, popular sovereignty and transformative possibilities in socio-digital discourse in the modern Arab Gulf region. Recognizing the dominant and residual ideology within social media narratives, the article deploys Raymond Williams’ critical and insightful concept of ‘structures of feeling’ in order to critically assess the alternative emergent collective expressions that diverge from, yet respond to, hegemonic and dominant discourse. One of the main goals of this article, therefore, is to go beyond the conventional analysis of ‘utopian versus dystopian’ binary instrumentalization of social media in the region, to challenge the claim that media (both as technology and as technique) determine social and political consciousness. More specifically, and in contrast to McLuhan’s famed dictum that ‘the medium is the message’, this article contends that digital and social media virtues and contributions are not confined to the instrumental communication that serves practical purposes. Rather, and more fundamentally, digital and social media involve the practices and lived experiences of individuals, culture and society, especially those that constitute the formations of collective and emergent identities.
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