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Unformatted Document Text:  Using the Web to Study Middle Eastern Newspapers and Activists Vickie Langohr, College of the Holy Cross Understanding how political actors perceive their world seems essential to any analysis of politics, but the wider the gap between these actors’ life experiences and culture and the scholar’s own, the more difficult achieving this understanding can be. By training I am a comparativist specializing in Middle Eastern politics, and it is in my Middle East politics class that I feel most acutely the challenge of communicating to First World, generally highly privileged students what life is like in poorer countries with different political and religious backgrounds. I feel that a main purpose of the class has to be to directly engage the serious problems in the region, from authoritarian rule to women’s subordination to the Arab-Israeli conflict, while simultaneously debunking prevalent stereotypes, from arguments that Arab Muslims don’t desire representative government (disproven repeatedly in polls) to the belief that all women who veil do so against their will. Since a major theme of the class is also violent conflict – both decades-long conflicts like the Arab-Israeli conflict and newer ones such as the war in Iraq – I find it particularly important to expose students to Middle Easterners’ views on these conflicts. But when Arab, Israeli, and Iranian political actors live half a world away and speak languages that the student doesn’t know, this becomes a difficult task. In this case, who “interprets” these actors for students, and with what biases or agendas? Over the past several years I have experimented with two main ways of exposing students to Middle Easterners’ views of politics in their region. The first is by having students do oral presentations on the views of Arab, Israeli, and Iranian citizens or activist groups; these presentations are usually based on students’ examination of the groups’ English-language websites. The second is by having students read English-language newspapers from Arab countries and from Israel, also on the web, for one month and write papers answering specific 1

Authors: Langohr, Vickie.
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Using the Web to Study Middle Eastern Newspapers and Activists
Vickie Langohr, College of the Holy Cross
Understanding how political actors perceive their world seems essential to any analysis of
politics, but the wider the gap between these actors’ life experiences and culture and the
scholar’s own, the more difficult achieving this understanding can be. By training I am a
comparativist specializing in Middle Eastern politics, and it is in my Middle East politics class
that I feel most acutely the challenge of communicating to First World, generally highly
privileged students what life is like in poorer countries with different political and religious
backgrounds. I feel that a main purpose of the class has to be to directly engage the serious
problems in the region, from authoritarian rule to women’s subordination to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, while simultaneously debunking prevalent stereotypes, from arguments that Arab
Muslims don’t desire representative government (disproven repeatedly in polls) to the belief that
all women who veil do so against their will. Since a major theme of the class is also violent
conflict – both decades-long conflicts like the Arab-Israeli conflict and newer ones such as the
war in Iraq – I find it particularly important to expose students to Middle Easterners’ views on
these conflicts. But when Arab, Israeli, and Iranian political actors live half a world away and
speak languages that the student doesn’t know, this becomes a difficult task. In this case, who
“interprets” these actors for students, and with what biases or agendas?
Over the past several years I have experimented with two main ways of exposing students
to Middle Easterners’ views of politics in their region. The first is by having students do oral
presentations on the views of Arab, Israeli, and Iranian citizens or activist groups; these
presentations are usually based on students’ examination of the groups’ English-language
websites. The second is by having students read English-language newspapers from Arab
countries and from Israel, also on the web, for one month and write papers answering specific
1


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