Dr. Dina Matar
Dr. Dina Matar is Reader in Political Communication and Chair of the Centre for Global Media and Communication at SOAS. She is interested in the relationship between politics and communication, cultural politics, digital activism and social movements, oral history, memory cultures and diasporic communication. Her area of focus in the Middle East. Dina has an MSc in Comparative Politics (LSE) and a PhD in Media and Communications (LSE). She works on narrative politics, media and conflict, political communication, cultural politics, memory, oral history and Islamist movements in the Arab World and its diaspora. Before joining SOAS in 2005, she was a teaching fellow at the LSE Media and Communications Department and a visiting lecturer in international/diplomatic journalism at City University. She previously worked as a journalist and editor in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and the US.
Dina is keen on bringing a non-Western approach to the theorisation and study of communication, in its diverse forms, through focusing on the dynamics between media practices and socio-political contexts. Her more recent work has focused on narrative politics and cultural and media histories in Palestine. Dina is co-founder and co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, the first trans-cultural and cross-disciplinary space for critical engagement with communication, culture and politics of the contemporary Middle East.