Income: Dima has generated over £750,000 in research income since joining Birmingham City University in 2014. She is currently working on three research projects all focussed on OECD/ODA countries. One of her projects, Check Global (in partnership with Meedan), has been recently awarded a major grant to expand their programmatic work from the NAWA to include partners in Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica and Venezuela), in East Africa (Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania) and in Southeast Asia (Philippines). Dima has, as part of her Associate Director role, devised a new strategy for bid development and peer review processes thus supporting the development and submission of over 30 research applications since 2018 for a total value of over £3M.
Impact: Dima has trained and collaborated with over 4500 political activists, citizen journalists, journalism students and human rights defenders in the MENA region as part of her ongoing research projects. She is the founder of M&E Lab (Monitoring & Evaluation Lab, impact@bcmcr.org), working with a number of academic and community partners on their qualitative and quantitative impact assessment plans and reports. She is the impact lead for her unit of assessment, and the author of an impact case study which will be submitted as part of BCU’s REF 2021 returns. Dima is currently supervising 3 PhD students all working on issues related to media and social impact, representation and new media genres, and has two completions to date.
The AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Peer Review College.
European Communication and Research Association (ECREA) and International Media and Communications Research (IAMCR).
ADM Women Researchers’ Network, BCU
Board Member of Mnemonic, The Syrian Archive and The Yemen Archive; and of the MENA Design Research Centre (MENA DRC).
MA Media and Cultural Studies
Recent Grants & Awards
Principal Investigator: Check Global: Developing a Verification and Anti-Disinformation Network for the Global South (2014 – 2021; £700k to date) – Swedish International Development Agency, SIDA.
Co-Investigator: Voices of War & Peace Engagement Centre, The Great War and its Legacy (2016 – 2019; £36k); leading the Peace & Conflict theme, University of Birmingham – AHRC.
Co-Investigator: Recording-by-Resistance: Producing Image Activism in post-2011 MENA (2018-2019; €50k) - Swedish Foundation for Humanities & Social Sciences, in partnership with Stockholm University.
Principal Investigator: Minding Black Histories in War Times: Remembering, Acknowledging and Documenting Contributions of Black Poppies in WWI (2017; £15k) - Voices of War & Peace Engagement Centre, University of Birmingham– AHRC.
Dima is interested in supervising doctoral students researching all aspects of media and cultural studies, particularly those interested in cultural theory, media and conflict, citizen journalism, archives and memory, media representations of social turmoil in post-war and revolutionary settings, digital literacy and social impact and dis-information/mis-information monitoring.
Saber, D. (2020, in press), ‘Transitional what?’: Perspectives from Syrian videographers on the YouTube take-downs and the ‘video-as-evidence’ ecology’ in Agostinho, D. et al. (Eds.), (W)archives. Archival Imaginaries and Contemporary Wars, pp. 385-408, Sternberg Press.
Saber, D. and Long, P. (2019), ‘Refugee writing, refugee history: Locating the refugee archive in the making of a history of the Syrian war’ in Durrant, S. et al. (Eds.), Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, pp. 444-462, Edinburgh University Press.
Saber, D. and Long, P. (2017), ‘I will not leave, my freedom is more precious than my blood’From affect to precarity: crowd-sourced citizen archives as memories of the Syrian war’. Archives and Records, 1: 38, pp. 80-99, doi: 10.1080/23257962.2016.
Saber, D. (2017), ‘Un/Framing Syria’: Citizen content, media discourses of war and ethical praxis of political filmmaking in the Digital Age’, in Dubberley, S. Finding the Truth Amongst the Fakes. Social Newsgathering and News Verification in the Arab World, Qatar: Aljazeera Media Institute, ISBN 978-9927-4011-6-9.
Saber, D. and Webber, N. (2016), ‘This is our Call of Duty: Ideology, History and Resistant Videogames in the Middle East’, Media, Culture and Society, 39: 1, pp. 77-93, doi: 10.1177/0163443716673897.
Saber, D. (2016), ‘From pan-Arabism to Political Islam: a Ricoeurian reading of Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the ‘6th war’ in Lebanon’, Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research, 1: 9, pp. 81-98, doi: 10.1386/ jammr.9.1.81_1.
