Special Topics in Cultural Anthropology: Visual Culture in the Middle East

ANTH 1737:How are social media and visual technologies shaping new forms of identity, community, and politics in the Middle East? This course problematizes and analyzes the role of new media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope, etc.) through an anthropological lens. We will adopt the lens of the smartphone and other internet enabled platforms to explore the stakes of this unique visual form of production, circulation, and storage of images and data. New media technologies have fundamentally changed the way we interact with one another and the world but also the way states, corporations and even private citizens can monitor our movements and actions. This has raised a gamut of concerns about large scale data storage systems, collection of personal metadata, face recognition, tracking, geotagging. How have new forms of social media and digital surveillance technologies impacted our understanding of subjectivity, privacy, and citizenship? How do they tie into new commercialization and marketing techniques? How do they employ affective registers and foster new forms of imagined communities? What is their role in “emancipatory” politics across various context in the world – especially after the “Arab Spring?”