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Introducing Students to Middle East Political Activists Through the World Wide Web: One Political Scientist’s Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Vickie Langohr*
Affiliation:
College of the Holy Cross

Extract

Particularly Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the issue of representation has loomed large in the consciousness of many Middle East scholars as we ply our trade. While this issue is undeniably important in our research, it may be even more crucial in our teaching. Encountering students whose only exposure to the Middle East has come through the evening news places a heavy burden on a teacher to respond to prevalent stereotypes about the region and replace them with a more complex, contextualized picture. One way to do this is to supplement the use of standard scholarly works on the region with primary documents in which a wide range of Middle Easterners “speak for themselves.” As scholars have pointed out in the Bulletin, the World Wide Web (www) provides many opportunities to do this in new ways. As a political scientist I chose to provide students in my Government and Politics of the Middle East course with these types of primary sources by designing a project in which students studied the strategies and goals of political activists of many stripes, and the responses of governments to them, by consulting the websites of political movements and newspapers.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 1999

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