Like the last five years, the next five years will continue to see a decentralization of what is encouraged and valued as media. The Internet served to shake traditional newspapers from their foundations – but rather than topple them, this tumult will organizations to prove their value in a flooded market. We’ve established in the last five years that while citizen journalists can be valuable, deep and important work can’t be done for free. Inshallah, the next five years will value the difficult, necessary work of professional journalists and reward them accordingly.
Serbia: The Balkan country offers a fascinating collision of Christian and Islamic political and social conflict, including some interesting early reverberations of Arab Spring‐like conflicts in the early 1990s. Occupy Wall Street has much to learn from Serbian youth movements like Otpor! and B92. Also, Soviet‐era architecture twenty years of decay and graffiti on is a fecund artistic and cultural trajectory of production.
I wrote an article about the Chechen women who set off bombs in Russian subways in 2009 – the article received a lot of international feedback, and allowed me a new inquiry for research on subjects of key concerns to many college students: feminism and transculturation.
