Dr. Deborah L. Wheeler holds a PhD in Political Science
and Middle Eastern Studies
from the University of Chicago.
She has taught for the past 7 years at
the University of Washington, Seattle in the Jackson School of
International Studies, and holds a joint appointment with the Department
of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She teaches classes in
contemporary Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies as well as courses in
International Policy Making, International Development, and in the
emerging field of Internet Studies where she has played a pioneering
role in defining the new discipline.
For the past 7 years, Dr. Wheeler has focused her research on the role
of the Internet as an agent of change in the Arab World. She has also
looked at the ways in which cultural, political and economic contexts
help to shape Internet use; in other words, that in spite of the digital
revolution, context and local identity still matter.
Dr. Wheeler has conducted extensive fieldwork
in the Arab World including Kuwait, where she held a Post-Doctoral
Fulbright Research grant in 1997; Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Dubai
and now in Jordan, where she has been living and conducting research for
the past 6 months, under the sponsorship of the University of Oxford's
Internet Institute.
Dr. Wheeler has held three fellowships in Internet Studies, one at the
University of Washington's Center for Internet Studies; one at Pacific
University's Bergland Center for Internet Studies; and most recently, as
a research fellow at Oxford University's Internet Institute, where she
will remain an academic visitor until June 2005.
Dr. Wheeler has published widely on the Internet in the Arab World,
including 14 articles and two forthcoming books. One book is entitled:
The Internet: Global Expectations/Local Imaginations and will be
available for purchase in May 2005 from State University of New York
Press. The second book is called "Comparing Arab Internet Cultures" and
is due out from Lynne Rienner Press sometime in 2006. She has given
lectures all over the world, including at the World Bank Global
Knowledge '97 meeting in Toronto; as a guest of the Fulbright
Bi-National Committee in Morocco; at the American Cultural Center
Damascus; at Kuwait's Conference on Information Super- Highway; in
Istanbul at the Women in the Global Community Conference; and at the
University of Westminster, London's workshop in Arab Media and the
Public Sphere. She has also lectured extensively in North America.
Dr. Wheeler is also an International Consultant specialising in
Information Technology and International Development issues. She has
recently worked for the Zein Al-Sheraf Institute for Development helping
to write and edit Jordan's National Human Development Report that will
be released publicly this month. Currently she is a consultant with the
Programme Development and Resource Mobilization Unit of the United
Nations Development Program. For the UN she is working in the areas of
Governance; ICT and Poverty Alleviation; Youth; and Human Rights.
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