[REVIEW] Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective

Edward Said's 1997 Covering Islam argued that negative public opinion about Muslims is significantly shaped by media representations.

Consciously echoing Said, Erik Bleich and A. Maurits van der Veen seek to quantitatively investigate Said’s more qualitative conclusions in Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective.

Whereas previous studies identified the media’s elevation of certain presuppositions and characterizations (x), Bleich and van der Veen test to what extent stories about Muslims actually are negative in comparison to average media coverage, both in general and with respect to other comparable religious groups. They also look at how the bulk of “resoundingly negative” stories about Islam can be accounted for and whether negative coverage of Islam and Muslims is a unique or enduring feature of the US media landscape.

In my latest review for Reading Religion from the American Academy of Religion, I provide an overview of the book and offer some reflections on how journalists might respond to the findings.

Best In-Depth Reporting on Religion

I am beyond grateful to announce that I was named the third place winner of the Best In-Depth Reporting on Religion award from the American Academy of Religion.

I love writing on religion, and going in depth on stories of relevance and import. To be recognized by the world’s largest association of academics who research or teach topics related to religion and to place behind wonderful religion writers like Peter Manseau and Dawn Araujo-Hawkins is an immense honor.

The judges had this to say about my work:

[Ken’s] reporting includes a delightful and eye-opening history of a Muslim acrobat in Liverpool, an insightful and timely article on how sports play a role in combatting ignorance and Islamophobia, and interesting reports on Jewish music and spiritual seeking in modern-day Germany.

Here below are the three stories I submitted, just in case you missed them last year.

Thanks in advance, for taking a (second) look.

The Liverpool Effect

A hidden grave, Moroccan acrobats, and combatting Islamophobia in Liverpool through sport.

Berlin: The not-so-secular city

Is Berlin the atheist capital of Europe? Maybe so…but maybe not.

Klezmer’s modern European revival

Yiddish Music Is Resurging In The Weimar Square Hitler Frequented

Religious Studies in Social Media: Promising Venues for Public Scholarship

Universities are not meant to be islands unto themselves. 

Instead, as Jaroslav Pelikan argued in his seminal work The Idea of the University: A Reexamination, every university has a duty to the societies in which it is situated — local, regional, and international. 

In an age of space and time compression thanks to advances in communications and digital technology those contexts are ever more immediate and expansive. 

The internet brings untold opportunity for universities to fulfill their duties to society. To share their research. To spread their knowledge. To engage in conversations. To develop its arts, humanities, and sciences for the fitness of the world.

That is why I believe that social media — and digital technology in general — provide prime platforms for scholars to share their ideas and innovations with the public. 

With that said, I am well aware that these media and technologies come with their own issues, dangers, and roadblocks — especially for women, people of color, and adherents of minority religions.  

To explore how scholars can best utilize social media as a means of sharing scholarship and engaging the major issues of our society I invite you to join me and a couple of other amazing scholars for an upcoming webinar. Even if you’re not a scholar you should join the conversation and share your perspective! 

The Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute’s October webinar, “Religious Studies in Social Media: Promising Venues for Public Scholarship” will be held October 18, 2018 from 12:00pm-1:00pm EST.

We will discuss how scholars of religion can engage different publics through social media to raise the visibility of their work. I will co-present with Kelly Baker, editor of Women in Higher Education and Simran Jeet Singh, post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media (NYU). The webinar will include a presentation and extended Q&A.

The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required here: RSVP.

The Public Scholars Project is a joint initiative of the American Academy of Religion and the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute. Through seminars and other resources, the Public Scholars Project equips scholars of religion to effectively communicate in the public sphere and foster religious literacy.

Be sure to take a look at their other webinars and events here. 

Islam as part of, rather than as foreign to, the West

Islam in the West. A simple enough statement, but one with multiple derivative implications. For this volume’s purposes, editor Edward E. Curtis IV makes it clear from the start that Islam is to be imagined “as part of, rather than as foreign to” to that which is referred to as “the West” (1).

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This point may seem subtle, but it is vitally important in a climate—both popular and academic—that imagines Muslims as outsiders to “Western culture,” and as unassimilated foreigners in matters of national Western polity.

The Bloomsbury Reader on Islam in the West stakes an important position by not only including readings that exhibit this current bias against Muslims as part of a vision of some trumped-up “clash of civilizations,” but also by showcasing work that highlights the specific and textured ways in which Muslims have long been part of the West and been intimately involved in its political, economic, social, cultural, and religious make-up.

Exploring the presence, and effect, of Muslims in the lands now collectively called “the West” from 711 (when Muslim polity ruled the Iberian Peninsula) to 2015 (amidst the “Global War on Terror”), the book is ambitious in scope and diverse in its contents. It is divided into two parts: “Islam in Western history,” and “Islam in the contemporary West.”

Hiring, firing, & evaluating digital humanities scholarship

If an academic can be un-hired, fired, or asked to resign because of a “tweet” or a blog post, can we find a way in the humanities to hire, promote, or offer tenure to academics for the same? 

This was one of the more provocative questions posed, and discussed, at a roundtable talk at the most recent THATCamp at the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA two weeks ago. 

Overview of #THATCampAARSBL

THATCamp stands for The Humanities And Technology Camp and the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting (professional and academic organizations in the study of religious studies and biblical literature, respectively) played host to the user-generated unconference for religious and biblical studies academics to set the agenda for discussion and work in the area of digital humanities — an area of research and teaching at the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. 

The sessions at the day-long unconference ranged from topics such as using Google engrams in your research to talks of tech in the classroom and podcasting religious studies topics successfully. I was honored to present my own collaborative work on Augmented Reality Criticisms (ARCs) with the TRACE Program at University of Florida. 

Overall, the quality of the content was impressive and the event created an interdisciplinary space where scholars from multiple disciplines and perspectives could share in ways that few other venues afford. Cheers to the organizers for putting on such a wonderful unconference and helping us all play a part in advancing the field! 

From my perspective, the key conversation from the day was whether, and if so how, to count digital scholarship toward hiring, promoting, and offering tenure in the academic world. 

Counting Digital Scholarship Toward Academic Advancement?

While the recognition of the value of digital scholarship is increasing and there is an awareness that the context of humanities research is changing quickly and deeply due to advances in digital technology there are no broadly agreed upon or applied standards for the professional evaluation of digital scholarship.

Certainly, the humanities have seen a spike in digitally innovative practices in the last decade with various scholars doing valuable work in the realm of digital humanities. However, the lack of formal evaluation procedures and attendant academic incentives (you know, like jobs, promotions, and the elusive “beast of tenure”), in the words of the American Historical Association (AHA), “discourages scholars at all levels from engaging with the new capacities. It also prevents the profession, and the departments in which it is grounded, from creatively confronting ways in which […] knowledge increasingly will be created and communicated.”

The THATCamp AAR/SBL conversation floated from the discussion of digital publishing and material/visual culture in existing dissertations and works to the evaluation of digital scholarship in publications such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. For me, there were two important points raised, from opposite ends, that need serious consideration as this discussion, hopefully, moves forward: 

1) Upholding academic standards. Although it might go without saying, it is vital that we do not “dumb down” the standards to accept, evaluate, and reward digital scholarship in hiring, promoting, and providing tenure for humanities scholars. Digital humanities work must also be given the level of respect that traditional academic scholarship receives and thus needs comparable,a= and stringent, evaluative measures. 

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Devices welcome at THATCamp AAR/SBL 2015! (PHOTO: THATCamp AAR/SBL) 

This means that departments and institutions that choose to evaluate digital humanities projects (from blogs to digital research designs) should subject them to serious academic review and not base assessment on popularity. Often, such appraisals are camouflaged under markers of “impact” in the public sphere. 

While I agree that impact is important judging projects based principally on their reach is akin to judging a scholar on whether or not their book sold a certain number of copies. The popularity of a publication or project is not directly indicative of the seriousness, or even the value, of research and we cannot let it guide our evaluation of digital humanities scholarship. 

With that said, it should be part of the conversation, because from my view one of the principal benefits of much digital humanist’s work is its broad audience and public value.

2) Defending the democratic digital. Related to the prospect of digital humanities scholarship having an impact in the public and popular spheres, it is also paramount that in judging digital humanities work we should not “copy/paste” the same standards for “traditional” academic scholarship (journal articles, books, etc.). This is vital for two reasons. 

First, the scholarship is different. Because digital humanists are sometimes dealing with different media, audiences, and outcomes it is not appropriate to evaluate their work according to the standards for a different set of means, market, or end product. Furthermore, digital humanities work is often more collaborative and interdisciplinary and many P&T committees already struggle with considering such efforts in traditional realms of scholarship. 

Second, one of my favorite aspects of my digital humanities work is the degree of play it involves and the democracy of the conversation. Through digital humanities work (blogging, social media, ARCs, digital-based ethnography, etc.) I am able to work in different streams and produce work for variant audiences than I normally would in my traditional academic research. It is liberating to engage the public and have more “fun” in doing work that is not required by my principal investigations. It is already intimidating enough to know that my tweets could end my career when they are not being evaluated as part of my “serious scholarship.” What would happen if they were fair game? That could be both blessing and curse. 

For this reason, I would want to see three categories of work and evaluation moving forward: scholarship that is digitally-based and contributes to public discourse without evaluation, scholarship that is digitally-based and affords some form of academic legitimization, and scholarship that is more “traditional” and is appraised accordingly. 

Conclusion

As can be deduced from the above, the conversation surrounding the production, and evaluation, of digital scholarship in consideration of academic advancement is still in its early days. Nonetheless, parsing through how to value and evaluate digital humanities research is both a fascinating and increasingly necessary, conversation with attendant cautions and incitements. 

The critical element is that your institution and/or department initiate the discussion. You might consider using this blog or the guidelines provided by the AHA as you do so. No matter what, it is vital that more programs and academics start the dialogue, because digital scholarship continues to emerge as a viable and valuable field of research in the humanities as the quality and quantity of presentations at THATCamp AAR/SBL testifies.