Ahlam Muhtaseb

California State University, San Bernardino, Communication Studies, Faculty Member

California State University, San Bernardino, Center for Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies, Director

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Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb is a professor of media studies and the director of the Center for Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. She is the recipient of the 2020 CSUSB Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creative Activities Award and was one of the 2019-20 Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Faculty Mentor Awardees. She has an M.A. in Journalism and a Ph.D. in Digital Communication from the University of Memphis, Tennessee. Her research interests include digital communication, social media, social justice and diasporic communities. Her most recent project is her award-wining documentary 1948: Creation & Catastrophe. The film, co-produced and co-directed with Andy Trimlett, focuses on the year 1948 and its catastrophic consequences on the Palestinian nation which has originated from her field work in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. She won the 2019 Rebuilding Alliance “Story Teller” Award. The film also won the Jerusalem International Film Festival’s 2019 Special Jury Award in the Feature Documentary category. Currently, she works on a new documentary on the three young Muslims who were murdered in Chapel Hill in 2015, and the state of racism and Islamophobia in the United States.

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Papers by Ahlam Muhtaseb

An accounting from Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb

Communication and race, Mar 15, 2024

An accounting from Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb

Communication and race, Mar 15, 2024

An accounting from Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb

Critical studies in media communication, Feb 7, 2024

On the censoring of Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2024

On Saturday, 18 November 2023, at the National Communication Association conference’s awards and ... more On Saturday, 18 November 2023, at the National Communication Association conference’s awards and presidential address, Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb, an award-winning filmmaker, researcher, scholar, educator, and public servant as well as our colleague from California State University, San Bernardino was prevented by NCA staff leadership from making the speech that appears below. Dr. Muhtaseb planned to make a statement referencing genocide in Gaza. In essence, she was censored because of her speech’s topic, even though she is an expert in our field on this subject. Other invited performers partaking in the presidential address, as well as many conference attendees present, walked out in protest. We are highlighting the speech here to uphold the values of academic freedom, to recognize the loss of life across the region particularly in Gaza, and to call attention to the ongoing and long-standing genocide against Palestinians and the crisis facing those elsewhere around the world within the Palestinian diaspora. We also acknowledge and abhor the violence of those killed, injured, and taken hostage in Israel on 7 October 2023.

An accounting from Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb

Quarterly Journal of Speech, Jan 18, 2024

On the censoring of Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb

by Srividya Ramasubramanian and Ahlam Muhtaseb

Communication Monographs, 2024

On Saturday, 18 November 2023, at the National Communication Association conference’s awards and ... more On Saturday, 18 November 2023, at the National Communication Association conference’s awards and presidential address, Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb, an award-winning filmmaker, researcher, scholar, educator, and public servant as well as our colleague from California State University, San Bernardino was prevented by NCA staff leadership from making the speech that appears below. Dr. Muhtaseb planned to make a statement referencing genocide
in Gaza. In essence, she was censored because of her speech’s topic, even though she is an expert in our field on this subject. Other invited performers partaking in the presidential address, as well as many conference attendees present, walked out in protest. We are highlighting the speech here to uphold the values of academic freedom, to recognize the loss of life across the region particularly in Gaza, and to call attention to the ongoing and long-standing genocide against Palestinians and the crisis facing those elsewhere around the world within the Palestinian diaspora. We also acknowledge and abhor the violence of those killed, injured, and taken hostage in Israel on 7 October 2023.

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Pilot E-Portfolio Project for Communication Studies Graduate Program

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Ahlam Muhtaseb CD Spring 2011

Designing a new undergraduate upper division class that revolves around the importance of communi... more Designing a new undergraduate upper division class that revolves around the importance of communication in seeking social justice and social change. I am currently teaching this class in the Fall quarter of 2011. Project Original Description: This proposal aims at developing an applied communication class from a social justice perspective to be offered at the Department of Communication Studies. The class will be offered the first time under the Advanced Topics Class in Human Communication. In the future, the class will be proposed as a permanent class in the communication discipline and would satisfy elective needs for all five communication concentrations. There are currently approximately 480 undergraduate and 40 graduate students enrolled in the Department of Communication Studies. This is a new class that has never been offered; therefore, there is not an available syllabus and part of the preparation for this class, to be covered by the grant, is creating a syllabus. However, the following topics will be covered in the proposed class: Applied communication theory and research; engaged scholarship, social constructions of reality; social constructions of meaning, language, thought and social power; political economy of communication; articulation and struggle; intervention-oriented applied communication research; case studies/ applications/ praxis; democracy and social responsibility; social justice and social change, applied communication ethics and funding.

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From behind the veil: Students' resistance from different directions

New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2007

In this chapter, critical race and expectancy violation theories are used to deconstruct students... more In this chapter, critical race and expectancy violation theories are used to deconstruct students' resistance to a female faculty member of color, a Muslim Arab American who wears the traditional Islamic cover. The author provides a narrative of her teaching experience and some techniques she has used to face such resistance.

Arab Americans’ Motives for Using the Internet as a Functional Media Alternative and Their Perceptions of U.S. Public Opinion

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Apr 1, 2008

This exploratory study employed uses and gratifications theory to understand Arab Americans' sali... more This exploratory study employed uses and gratifications theory to understand Arab Americans' salient motives for using the internet and whether the internet served as a functional alternative to other media to satisfy Arab Americans' information-seeking and interpersonal needs. Spiral of silence theory also was used to investigate the relationship between Arab Americans' perceptions of U.S. public opinion and their motives for using the internet. Results from an online questionnaire survey (N = 124) indicated that information seeking was the most salient motive for using the internet and that the internet did serve as a functional alternative, with a significant percentage of the internet sources used being foreign based. There was, however, no relationship between Arab Americans' perceptions of U.S. public opinion and their motives for using the internet. The findings are discussed with respect to the use of the internet by members of this marginalized cultural group.

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Ahlam Muhtaseb CD Spring 2011

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Ahlam Muhtaseb CD Spring 2011

Supports faculty to redesign or develop a course in ways that implement high-impact, evidence-bas... more

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Ahlam Muhtaseb TSSA Fall 16

Enhances faculty\u27s teaching by attending a conference devoted to university teaching, a high-i... more

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Pilot e Portfolio Project for Communication Studies Graduate Program

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US Media Darlings: Arab and Muslim Women Activists, Exceptionalism and the “Rescue Narrative”

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2020

Using critical textual analysis based on the postcolonial school of thought, this essay analyzed ... more Using critical textual analysis based on the postcolonial school of thought, this essay analyzed a ten-minute segment, called “Women of the Revolution,” on the ABC news program This Week, anchored at that time by Christiane Amanpour, for its portrayals of Arab and Muslim women. The analysis showed that Arab and Muslim women were portrayed positively only when they fit a “media-darling” trope of Western-educated Arab or Muslim women, or those who looked and acted similar to Western women, especially if they ascribed to a Western view of feminism. Those women also were seen as the exception to the “repressive” culture that characterizes the Arab and Muslim worlds, according to the Orientalist stereotype. The implications of this analysis indicate that, in spite of the visibility and progress of many Arab and Muslim women in their countries and indigenous cultures, they are still framed within old recycled molds in US mainstream media, even if these seem positive at face value.

Film Review of 1948: Creation and Catastrophe

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2018

Nakba means "catastrophe" in Arabic. Since 1948, it has come to denote the permanent expulsion an... more Nakba means "catastrophe" in Arabic. Since 1948, it has come to denote the permanent expulsion and dispossession of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands, and the rape, pillage, and massacre of thousands more, by Zionist militias during the years leading up to the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in historic Palestine. The Nakba caused a large proportion of the Palestinian population to become refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt and produced a significant Palestinian diaspora spanning Europe, the Americas, North Africa, and the Middle East. This ethnic cleansing of Palestine 1 was denied until recently by the dominant forces within the international community, the neoimperialist agenda of which was bolstered most notoriously by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's 1969 excoriation of the then-alliance between Egypt and the Soviet Union: 2 the political front against the advance of communism and radical labor was for her-and in large part remains-the suppression of Palestinian liberation. Forty-two years later in 2011, Israel, politically much further to the right than it was during Meir's time, passed a law that denies state funding to any public or government entity that memorializes the Nakba as an occasion for mourning. 3 Interpretation of the events surrounding the Nakba has been and remains contentious, both within the scholarly literature and in the public sphere, including the mediascape. Yet as documentary evidence of the event has increasingly been made available and disseminated, Zionists, scholars among them, have been compelled to acknowledge its occurrence, whereupon attempts to justify it in the proverbial name of Jewish safety-and more recently in accordance with Israeli legislation criminalizing the potential subversion of Zionism entailed by acknowledging the Nakba 4-have become prevalent. Perhaps the most illustrious, scholarly example of such casuistry is Benny Morris, who in his 2001 book, Righteous Victims, qualified his earlier research documenting the Nakba 5 with the claim that Israel would not have reached its current state of heightened defensiveness had the expulsion of the Palestinians not been more complete. 6 The great irony of Morris'

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Teaching media and culture of the Middle East to American Students

Americans know very little about the Middle East in general despite the fact that the region is a... more Americans know very little about the Middle East in general despite the fact that the region is at the heart of American foreign policy. While no one doubts the importance of teaching the history, culture, and politics of the Middle East in the United States, lack of basic knowledge coupled with the strong antipathy toward Arabs and Muslims make classroom teaching about the region quite challenging. Given that the current Islamophobic discourse in mainstream media and imperialistic American foreign policy misinform students about who Middle Easterners are, the so-called “war on terror” causes educators to be uneasy about discussing the Middle East in their classrooms. A strong pro-Israel lobby and other pressure groups make it even more difficult to have an independent intellectual discussion of the Middle East because of intimidation and anti-Semitism accusations that follow discussions of the Palestinian plight or the issue of the Palestinian refugees. Ismael (2011) adds that the ...

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US MEDIA DARLINGS: ARAB AND MUSLIM WOMEN ACTIVISTS, EXCEPTIONALISM AND THE "RESCUE NARRATIVE"

Spring, 2020

Using critical textual analysis based on the postcolonial school of thought, this essay analyzed ... more Using critical textual analysis based on the postcolonial school of thought, this essay analyzed a ten-minute segment, called "Women of the Revolution," on the ABC news program This Week, anchored at that time by Christiane Amanpour, for its portrayals of Arab and Muslim women. The analysis showed that Arab and Muslim women were portrayed positively only when they fit a "media-darling" trope of Western-educated Arab or Muslim women, or those who looked and acted similar to Western women, especially if they ascribed to a Western view of feminism. Those women also were seen as the exception to the "repressive" culture that characterizes the Arab and Muslim worlds, according to the Orientalist stereotype. The implications of this analysis indicate that, in spite of the visibility and progress of many Arab and Muslim women in their countries and indigenous cultures, they are still framed within old recycled molds in US mainstream media, even if these seem positive at face value.

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FILM REVIEW OF 1948: CREATION AND CATASTROPHE

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U.S. Media Darlings: Arab and Muslim Women Activists, Exceptionalism, and the “Rescue Narrative”

Using critical textual analysis that is based on the post-colonial school of thought, this paper ... more Using critical textual analysis that is based on the post-colonial school of thought, this paper proposes that Arab and Muslim women are positively portrayed in U.S. mainstream media only when they fit what I hypothesize as a “media darling” troupe; those Arab or Muslim women who were Western-educated and influenced or those who looked and acted like Western women, specially if they ascribed to a Western view of feminism that was not necessarily rooted in their indigenous cultures. They are also presented as the exception to the Orientalist repressive culture. The focus of analysis was the ABC news program “This Week” during Christian Amanpour’s tenure as its main anchor. A ten-minute segment titled “Women of the revolution” represented what is meant by an Arab/Muslim media darling.

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Ahlam Muhtaseb

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