Our congratulations go to (Dr) Chiara Bernardi who successfully defended her Thesis on Monday 29th June 2015: Digital Media and Women’s issues in Egypt and Saudi Arabia:

This thesis investigates how digital media participate in and contribute to the emergence and discussion of a number of women’s issues in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in complex intersections of online and offline activity. Specific focus is placed on digital media’s intrinsic complexity and agency, and their interplay with socio-political, economic, legal, and cultural practices.

This work sits in-between a number of disciplines, methodologies and approaches and has called for its own bespoke conceptual and methodological approach that includes close reading of history and literature on the topic, the countries’ political, social and economic background, and qualitative and quantitative analysis of digital content through digital media tools, such as Gephi, Digital Methods Initiatie’s Issue Crawler, Tags, Netvizz, and MOZ SERP.

Moving beyond an understanding of media as a tool and construing them as constitutive parts of an entangled network made of heterogeneous actants, I have analysed and discussed the diverse and continuous transformations of a number of women’s issues in these two countries, as they emerge and evolve online. The visualisations of the quantitative part of my analysis are published on the website http://www.oxycoms.com/clb.