This book presents a selection of eminent current scholarship that explores the role gender plays when religion, media use and values in contemporary society interact. It surveys the development of research on media, religion and culture through the lens of key theoretical and methodological issues and debates within gender studies.

This book explores the body and the production process of popular culture in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, and Iran in the first decade of the 21st century, and up to the current historical moment. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and cultural issues in film, cartoons, music, dance, photo-tattoos, graphic novels, fiction, and advertisements. Contributors to the volume span an array of specializations ranging across literary, postcolonial, gender, media, and Middle Eastern studies and contextualize their views within a larger historical and political moment, analyzing the emergence of a popular expression in the Middle East and North Africa region in recent years, and drawing conclusions pertaining to the direction of popular culture within a geopolitical context.

Are today's radicals tomorrow's extremists? Are adherents to Islamism necessarily extremist or violent? Most analyses of violence emanating from the Middle East or from Europe's Muslim communities tend to assume that this is the case. Not so in this book. The book, with a wide-ranging and case-by-case approach, examines the specific contexts of radicalism and asking what creates the conditions for radicalisation.

This volume provides a wealth of in-depth, country-specific analyses of the Arab Spring, in addition to works that examine the larger theoretical framework and socio-political implications of events. The studies and readings included here deal with the countries affected directly by the Arab Spring in addition to ones that focus on meta-trends in the Arab world: the unprecedented mass movements and attendant phenomena, from the mass mobilizations of social media to the effectiveness of non-violent resistance.