This paper argues that the violence in Iraq has created a double melancholy for women, as shifts in public space reveal the trauma of invasion and local conflict and the shifting attention to control over female bodies. Melancholia is a state of internalized trauma that causes shifts in emotion and a changing sense of self. The inward turning of melancholia also leads to a critical re-appraisal of self, a resistance that the female blogger from Baghdad terms a "virtual" self, and the "stubborn" private voice, the one that "blogs." Published in English to cross cultural lines, the blog is later published as the text Baghdad Burning. This author, code-named River, describes the spaces of "strangeness," both on the street and in her former work location, where she is fired after the war, when they decide to no longer hire women. She describes being "torn to pieces" as she recognizes that her former colleagues now have faces of "hostility." Her vocational identity is challenged twice, first by her colleagues who fire her from her job after the war, and a few of her western blog readers, who accuse her of not being Iraqi because of her fluency in English and computer skills. The losses continue as the Western media creates a reductive gaze, which further constricts ideas of Muslim women, defines suffering in American, not Iraqi terms, and is blinded towards the sufferings of Fallujah. This paper analyzes these doubling affects, multiple attacks on her subjectivity, which leads to a critical and painful shift towards her virtual identity. Describing her virtual identity as therapeutic River diagnoses the twin towers of Iraqi melancholy. She defines loss of female public space, despite the respect she enjoys in her familial space, and particular loss of western media, in contrast to the portraits of Al-Jazeera. The public and private splitting of gendered bodies and media spaces create shifts--new melancholic mirrors of nationalization.

In 2007, Mustafa al-Nagar made waves in the Arabic and English-language press by supporting the idea of a female or minority candidate in the Egyptian office of the president. A Cairo-based Muslim Brother, al-Nagar took issue with the proposed 2007 Party Platform and challenged the General Guidance Council to prove their commitment to Islamic moderation. The subsequent back-and-forth between al-Nagar and the leadership apparatus provides a ground-level perspective into the internal debates and ideological divisions of the contemporary Muslim Brothers. By combing through three years of al-Nagar's blog, "Waves in the Sea of Change", and five years of English-language wire service, this paper traces the political and social development of Mustafa al-Nagar and situates Islamist blogging within the framework of the Muslim Brothers' post-1984 metamorphosis into a moderate political party. This research begins with a comparison of secularist and Islamist bloggers in an endeavor to test the limits of conceptualizing the Egyptian blogosphere as a public sphere (Habermas 1991). Theoretically rooted in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's criteria for civic culture and liberalism (1963), an examination of al-Nagar's blog serves to shed light on the Muslim Brothers' public commitment to the democratic rules of the game and subsequent difficulty in responding to fellow Brothers as party constituents. In provocative posts such as "Preaching is Not Enough" and "Thanks Professor Akef...But Let's Talk," al-Nagar reconciles an Islamist worldview with the Western tenets of modernization and urges the Muslim Brothers to adopt a liberal agenda. By highlighting the intellectual convergence and political alliances between secularist and Islamist bloggers, this research aims to prod the Arabic and English-language literature on modern Islamic movements (Al-'Anani 2007; Lynch 2007; El-Ghobashy 2005; Wickham 2002). Al-Nagar's efforts to build bridges with non-Islamist activists and selective support for anti-regime demonstrations displays the innovative state of opposition politics in Egyptian state and society today. A study of al-Nagar demonstrates the modernist worldview of political Islamists - contrary to the radical portrayal of the Muslim Brothers prevalent in Western policy circles as well as in sectors of the academy - and makes a case for the contemporary Muslim Brothers' liberal ideological transformation. Al-Nagar's presentation of blogging as online da`wa exhibits the continuing salience of political Islamism in the post-9/11 context of global neoliberalism and Egyptian authoritarianism.

Today the world is full of various transnational contentious mobilizations, demonstrations, and movements initiated by various NGOs, INGOs, and/or transnational advocacy networks devoted to a number of issues, including but not limited to human rights, the environment, women's rights, peace and justice, and development. Whatever their origins, agendas, orientations or targets, all social movement mobilizations depend heavily on communication media. This has obliged social movements to seek the communication strategies that are most suitable for satisfying their constituencies as well as for increasing support and sympathy from the general public. While social movements of earlier periods depended on the printing press, telegraph, radio, and even television, the prospects of new local as well as transnational social mobilizations depend not only on these, but also on new media, such as the Internet, cell phones and other digital media. Resistanbul, a transnational anti-capitalist action network, was started by a coalition of activists in May 2009 to mobilize and coordinate wide-scale, mass demonstrations against International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) meetings scheduled to be held in nstanbul in October 2009. Organized through a web site (http://resistanbul.wordpress.com), Resistanbul is basically an umbrella protest network, an internetworked "hyper-organization" of anti-globalization. Although initially started to facilitate the mobilization and organization of a transnational protest action against the IMF and WB meetings, along the way it also rapidly responded to a number of local and national issues and threats against humanity. From its founding in May 2009 until the main anti-IMF and anti-WB demonstration, the activists of Resistanbul organized about 20 public demonstrations, including the one in Kumkap neighborhood in hstanbul, to show their solidarity with 'illegal immigrants' detained in a center euphemistically called "Foreigner's Guesthouse". In this paper we explore the ways in which Resistanbul, a transnational activist network, communicates both among its active members and with the public it seeks to influence. For that purpose we analyze different means of communication Resistanbul utilizes, by looking first at its use of the Internet to mobilize people and organize protest actions, and second at its attempts to attract mass media attention. We argue that in order to achieve the passage from micro to mass media, Resistanbul also organized various local protest campaigns on issues not directly related to their main cause, including the detention center demonstration.

Understanding how issues are framed and how politicians are invading our private life is important for the Millennial generation to be cognizant of. With the Internet most often seen as a tool of democracy, allowing for alternative views to exist and its attempt of inclusivity, as well as a place of an abundant amount of information, it is imperative that we understand how politicians, both domestically and internationally, are trying to control the information and conversation occurring in Cyberspace. Targeted audiences, website construction, specific messengers and messages, guised by 'democratic' websites and its twenty/four seven presence - the Internet is the new battle for international hegemony and politics. Thus, this paper is a study Queen Rania's YouTube Channel Project because I want to display how linguistic framing and website construction shape political discourse on the Internet in order to best understand how the Internet is becoming the new forum for hegemony. As the recent events in Iran's presidential elections have shown us, digital political activism can and do affect politics "on the ground". It is therefore integral for not only academics, but students of politics and people of the world, to recognize how the digital sphere can impact the physical, political sphere. My research methods include viewing YouTube clips, dissecting the Queen's project slogans and looking at the responses, both in terms of videos and comments that were not selected by the Queen to be highlighted on her Channel. In the end, I have found that through her main project slogan, "Send Me Your Stereotypes", the Queen shaped her conversation on YouTube to fit her political needs and her perspective. Through cultural references and language, along with appealing toward values of democracy, inclusion, multiculturalism and information through the Internet, Queen Rania's project is a plea to American Millennials to change their views regarding a specific demographic of Arabs within the Arab world.