International Journal of Communication
Publishes a Special Section on “Mediating Islamic State”
How does the group that calls itself “Islamic State” communicate?
How has Islamic State been understood and contested?
This Special Section on Mediating Islamic State gathers emergent scholarly voices, many deploying humanistic inquiry, to probe a phenomenon that has predominantly been the province of social scientists, in order to explore and understand the players, patterns, and practices that have mediated Islamic State: the communicative ways in which the group has been studied, reported on, visualized, narrated, mocked, spoofed, and resisted. We use “mediation” rather than “media” to shift public discourse on Islamic State beyond the focus on technology that has characterized research on media and sociopolitical change generally, and Islamic State communication in particular. Mediation connotes a broad approach to media, which includes words, images, bodies, platforms, and the expressive capacities and meaning-making practices that communicators generate when they deploy these media.
Originally presented at the Third Biennial Symposium of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, contributions tackle popular culture as a dynamic context for meaning creation, within a framework of media and culture as formative of identity and community, and not merely as conveyors of ideas, images, and information. Grounded in CARGC’s mission to advance a global media studies that fuses multidisciplinary regional knowledge with theory and methodology in the humanities and social sciences, we hope this special section continues spurring critical conversations that promise a new understanding of the transnational nexus of communication, identity, and violence. Together, these articles suggest imaginative avenues to understand phenomena like Islamic State beyond the narrow lens of what communication scholars would call administrative research within a national security paradigm.
We invite you to read this new Special Section of 10 articles in the International Journal of Communication that published March 8, 2020. Please Ctrl+Click on the titles below for direct hyperlinking. Looking forward to your feedback …
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Mediating Islamic State − Introduction
Marwan M. Kraidy, Marina R. Krikorian
The Islamic State: Politics by Other Means
Yara M. Damaj
Toward a Protostate Media System: The Role of ISIS’s Content
Kareem El Damanhoury
Islamic State War Documentaries
Nathaniel Greenberg
Iconic Socioclasm: Idol-Breaking and the Dawn of a New Social Order
Christoph Günther
Theologians, Poets, and Lone Wolves: Mapping Medium-Specific Epistemologies
of Radicalization
Brian T. Hughes
The Geopolitics of Television Drama and the War on Terror: Gharabeeb Soud Against Islamic State
Heather Jaber, Marwan M. Kraidy
Islamic State and Game of Thrones: The Global Among Tradition, Identity, and the Politics of Spectacle
Bashir Saade
Islamic State and Women: A Biopolitical Analysis
Mohammed Salih, Marwan M. Kraidy
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Larry Gross
Editor
Arlene Luck
Managing Editor
Marwan M. Kraidy, Marina R. Krikorian
Guest Editors
USC ANNENBERG PRESS 