College of Communication and Media Sciences

Many teachers consider themselves digital immigrants who struggle to keep up with student digital natives. Whether or not this dichotomy still holds true, in a 21st Century context of teaching and learning, is debatable not least of all because of the exponential development of apps and mobile learning technology. Nevertheless, it is sometimes dif cult for educators to know where to begin and for students to know how best to use it to advance their studies and improve their writing. Focusing on university students at a pre-university English as Second Language (ESL) program in Dubai, this paper discusses how mobile learning and the use of a range of apps can foster peer and self-editing, aid noticing and enhance ownership of the writing process. It is argued that  ipping corrective feedback helps students to notice their errors and spend more time developing their writing.

Introducing Multimodality offers a useful introduction into the ways multimodality has been approached across different research traditions. This is timely considering the visual turn in the social sciences and the magnitude of multimodal resources and representations at work in the visual economy (Poole: 1997; Rose: 2016; O'Halloran, Tan & Marissa: 2017). Jewitt, Bezemer and O'Halloran (2016) say their book is, " written for anyone who is interested in language, communication and meaning, including undergraduate and postgraduate students " and assure that no prior specialist knowledge of linguistics or semiotics are required. The following seven chapters, useful glossary and optional self-study guide, set about attempting to achieve this ambitious goal of providing clarity on the complex and methodologically diverse field of multimodality. Tracing the origins of the term multimodality, Jewitt, Bezemer & O'Halloran explain that the difficulty begins with the varying definitions and changes in the meaning of the term. A multimodal artefact consists of a combination of modes. Modes is a term used within systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics to refer to resources for meaning making. screens, or any material property communicating meaning. Each of these modes is organized according to the principles of semiotic resources that are recognized within a social context. Multimodality is also a combination of modes, for example a film consists of moving images, sounds, speech, text or captions, and therefore includes a mixture of semiotic resources, social meanings and interpretations, occurring in combinations and changing over time. These varying material, historical and temporal dimensions of multimodality contribute to the conceptual complexity and the authors make the important point that, " it is very difficult and potentially problematic to talk about multimodality without making explicit one's theoretical and methodological stance. " In other words, your underpinning views of language, meaning and communication will shape your approach to multimodality.

This blog post is a strand of Zayed University’s Languaging cluster sets out to tell a new story about academic reading in the Arab region. It looks at the role of digital reading in higher education, and in particular the multimodal affordances that social media has to offer bilingual readers. ‘Multimodal’ refers to the different modes of a particular text or event (for example: graphic, linguistic, audio, image, video, hypertext, etc.); and social media such as Instagram or Snapchat include a mix of these modes. Considering the positive attitudes to digital reading and social media in the UAE (Wischenbart, 2011) in contrast to a resistance to academic reading in the Arab region (Rajab and Al-Sadi, 2015), social media may offer the potential to help students engage with academic reading, through sharing images, discussion and interaction (Machin, 2007).  This study uses multimodal analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001, 2010; Jewitt et al., 2016)) and ideas from the Change Laboratory (Engeström, 2005) for a design-based intervention to address the challenges of academic reading and comprehending complex subject content in English as a second language.

This study explores the image sharing site Instagram to reveal how affordances, or uses of the platform, occur within a nexus of technological architecture, sociocultural contexts, and globalized commercial practices. It suggests social actors draw upon Instagram’s affordances at material, conceptual, and imaginary levels while using social media. This triadic modelfor theorizing affordances of Instagram responds to the need for mapping ontologies and typologies of social media within increasingly visual, intercultural, and non-Western contexts. The lenses of critical multimodality and a participant-centered method consider how female Gulf-Arab social media influencers operate through an interplay of shifting affordances in ways that challenge current conceptions of authenticity surrounding social media influencers. It is suggested that the triadic affordances of Instagram, occurring at material, conceptual, and imaginary levels, provide both influencers and followers with strategies of “fantastical authenticity” for navigating conflicting modes of representation and self-presentation within local and globalized economies.

Web 2.0. seemingly offered empowering opportunities for women globally. While #hashtags gained momentum, liberating women to speak-out against sexual oppression, forging networks for the right to learn to drive, to bridge the gender paygaps, and to close digital divide, the era of the posthuman, postdigital, and postgender seemed to be just around the corner. A key aspect of this apparent empowerment has been the visual scope of social media that allows women to show the world who they are and how they want to be seen. Teaching in a media and communications program at a university in Dubai, I became interested in the emerging trend of Arab women presenting their lives on social media via image-sharing platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat and assumed that these practices challenged gender inequalities.

Considering the seismic shift in current affairs since Covid-19, scholarship predating the global pandemic could be in danger of seeming redundant. Yet Culture & Crisis in the Arab World, published in 2019, explores Arab crisis culture at global scale and as an aspect of globalisation that is pertinent to a world in flux. Ten case studies ambitiously examine artistic, literary and media practices, enmeshed within authoritarian state control, prominent across Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria through a ‘post-Bourdieusian’ lens (p. 4). This article is a review of this timely collection of essays.

This chapter offers a postcolonial feminist reading of the works of the British-Italian travel writer and adventuress Freya Stark (1893-1993), who travelled extensively throughout the Middle East and North African region. Her impact on travel writing as an unmarried European woman traveler, at the beginning of the twentieth century, without income, local connections or colonial rank is notable. This chapter provides close reading, through a postcolonial feminist lens, of two first edition volumes of Stark's autobiographical travel books written during 1928-1939. The analysis explores the commercial nexus of Orientalism, which is the term that refers to Western depictions of the 'Eastern' world (Said E, Orientalism. Pantheon, New York, 1998). It discusses Stark's work in relation to conceived reader expectations, as well as her distinctly ambivalent attitude to British colonial-ism and colonials. I suggest that Stark's ambiguous role, as insider-outsider both within and between the Arab region and British Empire, poses provocative questions about the interrelationships of gender, self and 'Other' within commercialized Orientalist discourse (Ballaster R, Fabulous orients. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005). Stark makes specific discursive moves, not only as a traveler across continents, but in literary, ethnographic and gender terms. These moves manage to disrupt fixed framings, images and descriptions of Arab people, places and gender practices. This chapter therefore makes a unique contribution to theorizing Stark's work and, also, travel writing more generally, locating it as an import discursive genre that is always underpinned by moving practices of gender, politics and power.

Feminist semiotics is developed to explore Arab women's selfpresentations on Instagram. The novel framework enables interpretive theorising of a corpus Instagram posts by Arab women in the Middle East and North African region (MENA). Qualitative analysis zooms in on the accounts of four Arab women influencers, defined as microcelebrities monetising content online. Self-presentations are theorised as a process of semiosis, which involves signs, objects and interpretants of visual meanings. This perspective is contextual rather than universalising and addresses the lack of theoretical perspectives for considering Arab women's palette of selfpresentations. Simultaneously, the study is reflexive of tensions surrounding feminist semioticians' positionalities. Unique theorising reveals situated micro-practices and 'veiled affordances' of modest while sometimes highly politicised self-presentations by Arab women.

This study addresses the complex matrix of gendered visual interdependence/ independence of Arab women social media influencers, defined as micro-celebrities generating digital incomes. It takes Instagram and TikTok, image and video sharing platforms, as a case to illustrate examples of Arab women’s curated visual identities. The study synthesises feminist transnationalism and visual inquiry. Transnationalism refers not only to the movement and exchanges of consumer items, languages, practices and peoples across national borders, but it is also a research agenda concerned with the situated perspectives of social actors backgrounded by mainstream scholarship. Feminist transnationalism is synthesised with ‘inquiry graphics’ as a semiotic move to ask critical questions about images. This offers a unique contribution to feminist visual social media scholarship, both contextually and theoretically. The study reveals Arab women’s positionalities as occurring in simultaneously interdepende...

Social media intersects across physical spaces, digital infrastructures, and social subjectivities in terms of what is being called the “postdigital,” in an increasingly merging offline/online world. But what precisely does it mean to be “postdigital” if you are an Arab woman or social actor in the Global South? How does access to social networking sites, while increasing visibilities, also provide potential for increased agency? This study is concerned with the extent to which Arab women’s self-presentation practices on Instagram could be considered as empowering, or otherwise, within the postdigital condition. First, the study takes Instagram as a case to develop a theoretical framework for considering social media as a tertiary artifact, involving material, routine-symbolic, and conceptual affordances. Second, it applies the artifact framework to explore a corpus of self-presentations by five Arab women influencers. Feminist postdigital theorizing offers unique contributions to p...

Technological determinism has been driving conceptions of technology enhanced learning for the last two decades at least. The abrupt shift to the emergency delivery of online courses during COVID-19 has accelerated big tech’s coup d’état of higher education, perhaps irrevocably. Yet, commercial technologies are not necessarily aligned with dialogic conceptions of learning while a technological transmission model negates learners’ input and interactions. Mikhail Bakhtin viewed words as the multivocal bridge to social thought. His theory of the polysemy of language, that has subsequently been termed dialogism, has strong correlations with the semiotic philosophy of American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s semiotic philosophy of signs extends far beyond words, speech acts, linguistics, literary genres, and/or indeed human activity. This study traces links between Bakhtin’s dialogism with Peirce’s semiotics. Conceptual synthesis develops the semiotic-dialogic framework. Taki...

Web 2.0. seemingly offered empowering opportunities for women globally. While #hashtags gained momentum, liberating women to speak-out against sexual oppression, forging networks for the right to learn to drive, to bridge the gender pay gaps, and to close digital divide, the era of the posthuman, postdigital, and postgender seemed to be just around the corner. A key aspect of this apparent empowerment has been the visual scope of social media that allows women to show the world who they are and how they want to be seen. Teaching in a media and communications program at a university in Dubai, I became interested in the emerging trend of Arab women presenting their lives on social media via image-sharing platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat and assumed that these practices challenged gender inequalities.

This study explores the image sharing site Instagram to reveal how affordances, or uses of the platform, occur within a nexus of technological architecture, sociocultural contexts, and globalized commercial practices. It suggests social actors draw upon Instagram’s affordances at material, conceptual, and imaginary levels while using social media. This triadic model for theorizing affordances of Instagram responds to the need for mapping ontologies and typologies of social media within increasingly visual, intercultural, and non-Western contexts. The lenses of critical multimodality and a participant-centered method consider how female Gulf-Arab social media influencers operate through an interplay of shifting affordances in ways that challenge current conceptions of authenticity surrounding social media influencers. It is suggested that the triadic affordances of Instagram, occurring at material, conceptual, and imaginary levels, provide both influencers and followers with strategi...