This article reports on the first stage of a research project on German university students’ conceptualization of Arab women and to what extent it is affected by the latters’ representation in the Western press during the Arab Spring. We combined discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic approaches to investigate the relationship between lexical items used by the students to express their attitudes toward Arab women and those featuring in news headlines about them published in British, American, and German news media. Results show that the portrayal of Arab women in Western news headlines has a clear impact on German students’ opinions of them. The findings also show that our participants tend to be aware of this effect, which could be partly due to their familiarity with discourse analysis as students of linguistics. These results have implications for incorporating media education systematically in general university courses.
The Arab Women Solidarity Association United (AWSA United) emerged as an outlet for Arab women in the diaspora to express solidarity and support for women in the Arab world. It pioneered transnational Arab women’s groups that connected Arab women in all six continents. In this chapter, Rita Stephan explores the impact of AWSA United on Arab women activists who, between 1999 and 2011, used cyberfeminism to share their ideological and political marginalization, and how AWSA United helped them foster their collective identity, strengthen their connectivity, and increase their activism.
Since late 2010 and early 2011, the Arab region has witnessed mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain and other countries that have been referred to in the political, media and other literature as the Arab Spring. These movements have had a profound effect on the stability of the regimes Which took place against it, as leaders took off and contributed to radical reforms in party structures and public freedoms and the transfer of power, but it also contributed to the occurrence of many countries in an internal spiral, which led to the erosion of the state from the inside until it became a prominent feature of the Arab) as is the case in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq.
State, institutional and symbolic violence against women: the struggle since the «Arab spring» and the contribution of Arab women cartoonists
