Arabic world-views in focus

FAU cultural geographer receives award for dissertation

Dr. Shadia Husseini de Araújo from the Institute of Cultural Geography at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) was awarded with the dissertation prize for German-speaking research on the Middle East at the “German Middle East Studies Association” (DAVO) annual conference in Berlin. In her dissertation the researcher examines the world-views which are produced and reproduced through the texts and caricatures found in the major international Arabic-speaking press.

Since 11 September 2001, several research projects have been undertaken which analyse geopolitical discourses entered into by the Western media and Western politicians. Until now, studies to examine such discourses in the non-European media and corresponding sources have been few and far between. In this regard, Shadia Husseini de Araújo fills this research gap.

The academic researcher’s study revealed that the “clash of cultures”, a term used widely in the European and North American media, does not appear in Arabic newspapers as a realistic future scenario nor are parallel constructions established or reproduced with inverted symbols of good and evil. What is more prevalent is an apparently hopeless, post-colonial present, says Dr. Shadia Husseini de Araújo. “On the eve of the current upheavals and revolutions the media examined for research purposes described the Arabic world as subservient, exploited, marginalised and characterised by a great divide between the regime and the people.”

Dr. Shadia Husseini de Araújo studied Geography, and Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Universität Münster. From 2006 to 2009 she was a scholarship holder on a postgraduate programme at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen where she was part of the project “Humanism in the era of globalisation: an intercultural dialogue on culture, humanity and values”. Since 2009 she has been working in the Institute of Cultural Geography at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg where she is researching integration and diversity policies in German municipalities and, more particularly, the constitution of Muslim diaspora communities in Brazil.

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