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Working Women In Liberian Media: Uncovering Histories through Television Archives and Personal Stories (1980-1991)

Georgetown University in Qatar Doha

The discussion surrounding African women and the media is complex, addressing topics like media representation, gendered labor, and women as producers and consumers. As cultural producers, women communicate everyday realities across time and space (Ellerson 2016; 2018). This project, based on research using the digitized archives of Eternal Love Television (ELTV) broadcasts by the Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS), centralizes women's work and voices. It examines women's roles in broadcast media through television archives and personal stories, asking how the digital archive reformulates knowledge production. It uncovers counter-narratives of identity, history, and culture, and explores how women's histories can be rewritten through audiovisual documentation. The project also investigates how archives and personal stories co-create new understandings of African media history, feminist media, and national history.

Edidiong Ibanga is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her research interests include women and gender studies, women's and social histories, knowledge sources, and African media studies and histories. She is currently working within the Junior Research Group – African Knowledges and the History Publication since the 1970s – which focuses on aspects of Liberia's history, history sources, and heritage.

Location: 0A13, Georgetown University in Qatar

AI in the GCC: Opportunities & Challenges

Georgetown University in Qatar Doha

Generative AI has captured the global public imagination. This webinar introduces participants to the many opportunities for both traditional and generative AI deployment in the GCC countries. It highlights aspects of both operational technology and strategic leadership, including global and regional foreign policy, national-level AI regulation, countrywide business usage, and country-level digital transformation. It also highlights some of the challenges involved in the deployment and uptake of AI in the region, including language and cultural constraints, lack of relevant data availability, and the absence of a regulatory framework around AI in Gulf countries.

Speaker: Manail Anis Ahmed

Manail Anis Ahmed is an educator, thought leader and convener on technology and society. She has worked to build educational institutions and human capital development strategy in the Middle East and South Asia for two decades. She is now an adjunct lecturer at John's Hopkins University. She also advises global governments on digital public infrastructure. As a former visiting lecturer at Princeton University, she designed and taught courses on Responsible AI. She leads a global research group at the Center for AI & Digital Policy in Washington DC and is a member of the Inclusive AI workstream for the World Economic Forum's AI Governance Alliance. She is also a Public Voices Fellow for Equality Now, advocating for the economic participation of women and girls globally.

Manail has led the establishment of organizations and institutions for learning, research and scholarship. She has also architected government regulation, knowledge management infrastructure, and human capital development strategies for an entirely new global city and economic zone. She now brings this whole-systems approach to examining the impact of technology, especially AI, on both American as well as global business and society.

Materialising ‘Arab Jerusalem’: Resistance, Resilience and Continuity 1948 – 2025

Georgetown University in Qatar Doha

The dominant narrative of 1948-1967 Jordanian Jerusalem, if there is one at all, is of a marginalized city with passive citizens, decimated by the extraction of its vibrant West Jerusalem heart, constrained politically by new state structures and generating little autonomous urban development. This assumption is simplistic and inaccurate. A counter-narrative emerges if one listens to the oral narratives told by Jerusalemites, examines rare archival records and diaries, scans the newspapers of the time, and investigates the spatial transitions in its urban landscape across two decades. 

This research presents an alternative story that reveals the centrality of Arab Jerusalem to the agentic empowerment of the inhabitants of al-Quds as they reshaped the post-Nakba space and place. The multiscalar relations empowered by the Qalandiya-Jerusalem airport materialized a vibrant 'Arab Jerusalem', an emanant Arab metropolitan space thickly connected into the urban circuits weaving together the wider Arab region. Such integrative effects enhanced the cosmopolitanism of its street life, opened up political space, generated transformative investment, reshaped its neighbourhoods and created exciting opportunities for personal and communal development.

This presentation (based on ongoing research for a book to be published with Edinburgh University Press) also uncovers the development and continuity of a ‘Jordanian Jerusalem’, as crafted by Jerusalemites themselves across numerous transitions, ruptures and attempts at control from its emergence in 1948 until the al-Karama/May uprising of 2021. The work sheds light on the emergence and continuity of what can be called a ‘Jordanian Jerusalem’ and its ongoing links to Amman and the Arab world. Despite the fact that today’s story of occupied Jerusalem is central to understanding the ongoing protest and resistance, today’s Jerusalem cannot be understood in depth without understanding Jordanian and Palestinian politics in East Jerusalem since 1948. 

Dr. Mansour Nasasra is a Palestinian political historian and anthropologist, currently Visiting Researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and a Research Fellow at Ulster University, Belfast. He completed his PhD at the University of Exeter, where he subsequently was Senior Lecturer in International Relations. He has been a CBRL research fellow at the Council’s Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, funded by the British Academy. His publications include:  The Naqab Bedouins: A Century of Politics and Resistance (Columbia University Press, 2018), and the Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities (2020) (ed.). His most recent article is "The City of Beersheba and the Network of Political and Social Relations in Gaza City" (Urban Studies 51.1, 2024). Other recent work on Jerusalem and the Oslo Accords was published in the edited volume From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of Peace, translated into Arabic by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (2024). He has also published widely about the Palestinians in Israel, the frontiers of Empire, Colonial Policing and the Naqab Bedouin. 

Moderated by Dr. Gerd Nonneman

Location: Georgetown University in Qatar, Faculty Conference Room (1D02)

Time: 6:00 - 8:00 PM