Wazhmah Osman

Wazhmah Osman is an assistant professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production and a faculty member in both the Master of Science in Globalization and Development Communication program and the Ph.D. program in Media and Communication. She is a faculty affiliate of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) program, as well as the South Asia Center at University of Pennsylvania.

Osman earned her Ph.D. in 2012 from New York University, where she studied Media, Culture and Communication. She is also a graduate of the Culture and Media program in Anthropology. Her research and teaching are rooted in feminist media ethnographies that focus on the political economy of global media industries and the regimes of representation and visual culture they produce.

Osman's book, Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2020), analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the national politics of Afghanistan, the region and beyond. She is also researching how new technologies of war, violence and representation, predicated on old colonial tropes, are being repackaged and deployed during “the war on terror.” Her critically acclaimed documentary, Postcards from Tora Bora, has been shown in festivals around the world.

Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists

By

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women’s rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. In her new book, Television and the Afghan Culture Wars, Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace.

Read more