Children and Screen Media in Changing Arab Contexts

Ethnography as thrownness and the face of the sufferer

“…It is a reciprocal dynamic of unsettling. However, as the gaze moves away from the face of the other into buildings, architecture, posters, graffiti, mourning mothers in black, another form of unsettling ensues (see Sabry and Mansour, 2019). I conjured up memories from my childhood of the conspicuous displays of the then King of Morocco (Hassan II) at the school, the shops, the university, the hospital, railways, streets, highways, government offices, the barber’s, the baker’s and in hotels.…”

“…I am not sure how they missed out hammams! In Dahia , such imagery of power, and its monopoly over appearances, was more diverse; what you get is images of religious leaders, resistance heroes, martyrs, all men, of course, but different men, nonetheless (see Sabry and Mansour, 2019). As a stranger, and an estranged British North African, what I found eerie was not just the religious and warring nature of the posters or the aura they exuded, but their size.…”

“…He had been beaten up at the entrance to the camp. It was shocking and unsettling to see the bruises on Hicham’s face, and I wondered whether it made any sense at all to start asking the children about their media uses, or to even carry on with the ethnographic session that day (see Sabry and Mansour, 2019):…”

“…Drawing on research conducted in the Lebanon in the summer of 2015 with a Syrian refugee family, also part of a bigger audience research project including fieldwork in Morocco and the United Kingdom 1 (see Sabry and Mansour, 2019), this article uses findings from family ethnography and participant observation, conducted over a period of 4 weeks in Beirut, (a) to provide an ethnographic description and analysis of the media worlds in a Hizbullah area in South Beirut, (b) on media uses and aesthetics of violence in the context of war/refugees’ lives and (c) I use the concept of thrownness to phenomenologically capture and theorise the affective regime that emerges during the ethnographic encounter. However, rather than merely focus on media users’ everyday experiences through the consumption of screen media texts, this work delineates a ‘non-media-centric’ approach (see Moores, 1993; Morley, 1992) that situates the media within a wider, complex and relational structure (including both screen and non-screen media).…”

Screen Media for Arab and European Children: Policy and Production Encounters in the Multiplatform Era

“…The book, divided into 6 chapters, is a companion to 'Children and Screen Media in Changing Arab Contexts: An Ethnographic Perspective' (Sabry and Mansour 2019) and uses data from two different research projects: Orientations in the Development of Pan-Arab Television for Children (2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016) and Collaborative Development of Children's Screen Content in an Era of Forced Migration Flows: Facilitating Arab-European Dialogue (2017-2018. The authors strive against taking a country, regional or ethno-centric approach in their extensive analysing of screen content policy and production initiatives.…”