Applications are invited for a full-time scholarship available in the School of Journalism, Media & Communication. The scholarship is tenable for up to 3 years for a PhD (via MPhil route) [subject to satisfactory progress] and is open to international applicants only. UK/EU applicants are not eligible to apply. The scholarship will provide £15000 towards the cost of the International tuition fee over 3 years. Political analysts for Al Jazeera have suggested the ‘Dawn of a new Arab century’ (22/2/11). Hilary Clinton has claimed that America is losing the information war to stations such as Al Jazeera and RT (6/3/11).The resilience and determination of Egyptians and other Arab nations to assert a peaceful claim to power and demand democracy challenged the Western notion of the ‘arab exception’ to the desire for democracy and thus more broadly the dominant Orientalist stereotype of the East as irrational, unchanging, emotional and autocratic.
Through a critical discourse analysis approach, this PhD thesis will explore contemporary shifts in representations of the Arab world from the war on terror to the current Arab ‘revolutions’ to consider the ways in which an Orientalist/ ‘exception’ discourse is redrawn, challenged or asserted in western and/or Arab media in 2011. Will changing political realities and the methods of political action through which Arab people attempt to assert agency (Spivak 1988) impact on the Orientalist / ‘exception’ discourse? Should we revisit this agenda to consider the impact of an increasingly globalised consumer market on representation of the Arab world? (Ritzer 2007) The thesis will examine both visual and linguistic discourses. Applicants should have, or expect to receive a qualification equivalent to a high class UK honours degree.

Scholarship Application Deadline: 13 May 2011

Further Scholarship Information and Application