Marwan M. Kraidy is Dean and CEO of Northwestern University in Qatar and Professor of Communication, holding the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics, and Culture. His scholarship has long traced the entanglement of media systems with geopolitics, especially in the Arab world. Here he reflects on media not simply as channels of communication but as sites where cultural expression, political struggle, and historical imagination converge. His remarks emphasize how visual culture, performance, and everyday creativity become vehicles through which power is contested and rearticulated. Rather than treating global media as uniform, he foregrounds uneven circulations—how regional dynamics, language, and local histories shape what media can do. The interview highlights a persistent concern in his work: how mediated practices generate new forms of political subjectivity, particularly in moments of upheaval, where representation is inseparable from action and imagination.
