Rayya El Zein, "Neoliberal Orientalism"

Rayya El Zein is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her research concerns processes of live cultural production, popular culture and media, and audiences in urban Arab contexts and diasporas. In her work, she examines the political economy of consumption and leisure as an important part of the politics of reception and spectatorship. Ongoing ethnographic projects supported by the Winner-Gren Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, and an IIE Fulbright center on live music and the media representations of hybrid cultural phenomena amid patterns of neoliberal growth in the Levant. Her writing has appeared in Lateral, the Journal of Palestine Studies, Theatre Journal, Ethnomusicology Forum and on the e-zine Jadaliyya. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.