The University of Cambridge & Al Jazeera: A Unique Partnership
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
evocative of its Arab culture. We began with an initial year of research into the effects of the Arab Spring uprisings on the media. Starting in Tunisia, under the title of ‘Media in Political Transition’, we held conferences and workshops in both Doha and Cambridge, which enabled us to devise a long-term programme of research that would be both ground-breaking and timely – two key ideas that tied the essence of both our organisations together. Al Jazeera was the first – and so far has been the only – Arab media conglomerate to fund independent research, with no strings attached, at a major university. It was also the largest private funding to be received in a decade at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge. Through the Cambridge-Al Jazeera Media Project, we achieved a number of milestones: We brought on the first Al Jazeera Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Dr Ali Sonay, who also spent several months at the AJCS in Doha during his appointment. We produced three special academic journal issues – one each on Media in Political Transition in Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey (published in the Journal of North African Studies and Middle East Critique).
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