‚This is our Call of Duty’: Ideology, History and Resistant Videogames in t…

In recent years, non-state actors in the Middle East have engaged a new generation of activists through a variety of media strategies. Notable amongst these have been a series of videogame interventions, which have appropriated Western game products to convey specific political and religious messages through the inversion or complication of the roles of hero and enemy. Dima Saber explores a selection of such media, produced by or in support of two prominent non-state groups, Hezbollah and Islamic State, arguing that while these video games challenge prevailing(re)presentations of the Middle East and the ‘War on Terror’, they remove or reduce agency to the extent that those who engage with these representations can only witness these challenges, rather than instigate their own.

Speaker: Dima Saber, The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research

About the speaker:

Dr. Dima Saber is a Senior Research Fellow at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (Birmingham City University). Her research focuses on media depictions of conflict in the Arab region. She is also responsible for leading and delivering projects in citizen journalism, particularly exploring the relation between digital media literacy and social impact in post-revolution and in conflict settings such as Egypt, Palestine and Syria.