Jowan Mahmod
Renegotiating Kurdishness and Performing Belongingness: The Online Offline Nexus
The thesis concerns younger generations of Kurdish diasporas in the UK and Sweden, with reference to homeland-based Kurds, and how the former rearticulate Kurdishness firstly at the intersection of online and offline environments and secondly at the crossroads of settlement country and homeland countries. Against such background it is questioned what it means to be a Kurd in diaspora. The research takes a critical stance challenging how the diaspora concept has been used firstly in ways that overlook the conditions that produce diasporic subjectivities, then against the continuous emphasis on ‘displaced’ and ‘uprooted’ overlooking the processes that are occurring ‘here and now’. The central point of the research is that views of identity and ethnicity, home and belongingness, and nation-state and citizenship are more complex than previously identified.
Publications
Mahmod, J. (2011) “Designing scripts and performing Kurdishness in diaspora: the online-offline nexus’, Cultural Policy, Criticism and Management Research 5: 72-90.
Biography
Jowan Mahmod, born in Kurdistan (north Iraq), received her BA and MA in Media and Communications from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, 2005. Jowan then worked at a PR-consultancy agency in Stockholm and as Assistant researcher at Uppsala University. She has also been the editor-in-chief for an online periodical, and freelance for a film review online site. She started her Ph.D. in 2008, as part of the project “Europe in Motion” at the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre: Spaces, Connections, Control. Academic interests lie in critical theory, new social media and diaspora, Middle East and Muslim societies.