Buffett Q&A: Shame as Digital Currency in the Global South with Professor Heather Jaber, ‘24–25 Faculty Fellow

Video produced by our partners at Northwestern University in Qatar

Our latest Buffett Q&A highlights the research that Heather Jaber, Assistant Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar, pursued during her 2024–25 fellowship year, supported jointly by the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Jaber’s forthcoming book, Eating It: Digital Bahdala and the Politics of Humiliation, explores bahdala—the Arabic term for humbling ridicule—as a framework for understanding how online spectacles of shame shape global belonging.

Tell us about yourself and your work.

I'm Heather Jaber, Assistant Professor of Digital Culture across the Communication and Liberal Arts programs at Northwestern University in Qatar. I teach courses around digital culture and emotion, which is also the focus of my research. The fellowship I received from the Roberta Buffett Institute and the Alice Kaplan Institute enabled me to work on vital chapters of my book project, Eating It: Digital Bahdala and the Politics of Humiliation, which are the main case studies that the book is centered around.

What are the central ideas of your book project?

My book turns to the aftermath of the revolutions across Lebanon and Egypt in the post-2011 period, with a specific interest in studying digital practices where people are engaging in what I refer to as digital bahdala, which is the Arabic term for a host of feelings and experiences including humiliation, degradation, or mistreatment. In my work, I define this as “eating it.” Specifically, I turn to the way emerging publics describe the feeling of “eating it” on a global stage—the Internet. I show that while earlier media forms depicted more clarity around where humiliation came from, digital platforms, which are constructed as global spaces, make the question of who is eating it and who is dishing it out a site of national contestation. To confront a crisis of sovereignty in an ambiguous political and media landscape, digital publics negotiate moments where the nation ‘eats it.’

What is an example of digital bahdala?

On January 23, 2020, Lebanese Twitter was ablaze around the ‘grilling’ of Gebran Bassil, former foreign minister and leader of the largest political bloc in Lebanon, by CNBC International news correspondent Hadley Gamble at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Bassil’s participation in Davos upset a digitally active group of diaspora who demanded that the WEF revoke their invitation to the leader, whose name protestors had denounced in mobilizations against the state in the weeks prior. They shared interview clips framed as embarrassing, poking fun at his accented English and dumbfounded facial expressions. However, a counter-campaign, using the very same images, celebrated his resistance in the face of Western aggression. These clips join a wider constellation of campaigns around postcolonial leaders' ‘slights’ reframed as resistant performances at global forums, from Pakistan’s Imran Khan to Turkey’s Recep Erdogan.

Popular belief around global shaming relies on the logic that it disempowers those it targets. But I argue that these practices are empowering as performances of resilience to forces felt as ‘global.’ Today, there is affective currency in being ahead of the curve by recognizing that one is ‘eating it.’ In creating, circulating, and responding to these moments, digital publics engage in performances of endurance which turn consumption into righteous, visceral, and pleasurable acts of sovereignty.

How does bahdala influence the Global South’s digital landscape?

Through transnational examples in the book, I show that important ways of reproducing and sustaining society are increasingly devalued under neoliberalism, evidenced by mass mobilizations against degrading conditions of life-making, and more specifically, the commercialization of social media platforms. This is perhaps most evident in postcolonial contexts which have been sites of resource extraction, proxy war, and political experimentation, but it tells the future of what is happening across the world. From daily practices of consumption to political spectacles of ridicule, bahdala is key to understanding what happens when we devalue vital forms of labor—like education and care work—in the name of nation-building.

How can academics in other areas of study utilize the framework you’ve used while investigating bahdala?

For scholars in communication and media studies, I would like to offer a framework for thinking about vernaculars as a whole. My book centers around bahdala, but what other vernaculars can we use to theorize from particular material sites? What new ways of understanding the world can this bring?

How does this project build upon your previous research?

My previous work looked at moral panics and scandals to understand the intersection of media and nation-building. I build upon this work by looking at the clues that embodied expressions give us about political life. I want to show that examining media at the intimate, micro-level can tell us more, not less, about power.