Faculty & Staff Member Profile

Nermeen Kassem is an Assistant Professor in and Coordinator of the Mass Communication and Media Department at the Gulf University for Science and Technology (GUST). Before joining Gust, she has been an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology (Media and Communication Studies Program) at Ain-Shams University. She specializes in new media, mediated mobilization and, more specifically, in how young cohorts’ use of new media in societies in transition contributes to their civic cultivation and political participation. The underlying concern of her research is an understanding of the conditions for youth to perceive themselves as citizens and, hence, participate in the broader process of societal and political development of their society. Nermeen obtained her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of York (UK) in 2014. Her dissertation, “Young Egyptian Activists’ Perceptions about the Potential of Social Media for Mobilization,” focused on an in-depth examination of the potential of social media for mobilizing collective action. Themes of media usage, dispositions (fear of authority and political efficacy) and actions (online and off-line) that appear to relate to youth perceptions were investigated and analyzed. In late 2018, Nermeen has Visited the Radio, Television and Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin until mid-2019. She has been involved in major research projects over the past seven years in the UK, USA and the Middle East. Nermeen was also a Research Associate in the Five College Women’s Studies Research Centre at Mount Holyoke University (USA). Towards developing her research agenda looking at media performance and policy making in the Middle East, Nermeen joined the Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute in 2017 at the University of Oxford. She has recently worked on a large policy-making project with the Open Society Foundations and Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the Ame