The University of Cambridge & Al Jazeera: A Unique Partnership Dr. Roxane Farmanfarmaian | Lecturer at University of Cambridge
My first encounter with Al Jazeera began quietly, unexpectedly, in the course of the normal conduct of my life as a lecturer of modern Middle East relations at the politics department at Cambridge. It began with a student, who was also my supervisee. Mohammed Nanahbay was among Wada Khanfar’s early recruits, brought on to design and manage a digital expression of the news, and which soon became a critical arm of the company: Al Jazeera Online English. Calm, driven, but with a smouldering intellect and deeply professional, Mohammed had joined the part-time International Relations Master’s programme mid-career, and came to represent what I grew to associate with all my future encounters and later partnership with Al Jazeera: strong journalistic ethics, vision, and purpose. Toward the middle of the course, Mohammed invited me to Doha to attend an Al Jazeera Forum. It was my first experience in the Gulf. The Forum brought political adversaries onto the same stage in a way I had not seen before – an American CIA operative from Afghanistan and the spokesman for Hezbollah; or an Iranian and a Saudi official. Sometimes they shouted, but mostly they conversed. While at the conference, Mohammed introduced me
to Dr Salah Eddin Elzein, Director of the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies (AJCS). Little did I know at the time that Dr Salah would become not only a highly valued colleague, but my partner in a unique project linking Al Jazeera and Cambridge. The collaboration began in the summer of 2014 with his invitation for me to spend some months at the Centre for Studies as its Inaugural Visiting Fellow. We worked on the Centre’s English online newsletter, and on ways to link the Centre’s work to the news stories being produced on both the English and Arabic channels. Then, we conceived a plan, with the support of the head of strategy at the time, to launch a much bigger project: a research centre on Middle East media at Cambridge, under the umbrella of the Centre for the Study of the International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa, CIRMENA, which I directed at POLIS, the politics department. Finding common ground between our two massive organisations was challenging, as the University of Cambridge is one of the oldest pedagogical institutions in the world, a behemoth of interlinked departments and colleges, and in character deeply English; while Al Jazeera was a young, expanding, fast-changing media network at the forefront of a new wave of global broadcasting, and strongly
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