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.