Kristina Riegert (b.1964) is Professor in Media & Communication Studies, having previously held a lectureship in Journalism and a Ph.d in Political Science from Stockholm University. She is co-editor of Media Houses: Architecture, Media and the Production of Centrality (Peter Lang, 2010), editor of Politicotainment: Television’s Take on the Real (Peter Lang, 2007) and head author of Transnational and National Media in Global Crisis (Hampton Press, forthcoming), and The Image War: NATO’s Battle for Kosovo in the British Media. (Örebro University Press, 2003). Her research interests are media globalisation, television coverage of conflict and crisis, television’s role in national identity, and politics in entertainment television formats. Her most recent research has been on the links between the transnational and national television media in global crises, and on the relationship between architecture and journalist organizations as a focus for mediated centrality in a mobile digital world. She is currently working on a project, together with Arabist Gail Ramsay, on the nature and impact of four Arab blogospheres in their respective mediascapes.

The Nature and Impact of the Arabic Blogosphere: What kind of publics?
Funded by the Swedish Science Council 2010-2012. With Professor Gail Ramsay

For years now, scholars have recognized that globalisation and media studies have been Western-centric, yet the new media studies literature still focuses on the Western democracies, with just a few exceptions exploring the Chinese and Iranian blogospheres (Abdulla, 2007; Tai, 2006; Sreberny & Khiabany, 2010). This study analyses blogs in Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and asks whether we can speak of emerging “counter-public spheres”, transcending national and political/cultural boundaries and blurring the lines between formal and informal speech, the private and the public, entertainment and politics. We have selected the top ten most linked to and most visited English and Arabic language blogs for analysis and comparison, asking whether these blogs stretch political, cultural and linguistic norms for what can be said in various public spheres. What relationships do these blogs have to each other, to the media in the region and to the diaspora in the West? Finally, we will focus specially on several influential female bloggers from the vantage point of women being able to exercise agency. With the help of interviews and textual analysis we ask whether women’ motives, narratives and interest in political and cultural debates differ from their male compatriots.