About

Isra Ali is a Clinical Associate Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, where she also earned a Louis Bevier Dissertation Fellowship. Her academic background includes an M.A. in Media Studies from the New School University in New York City and a B.A. in English Literature and Communications from the University of Kansas. As a feminist media scholar, her research focuses on the war on terror era militarism, examining how feminism is mobilized in public discourse on the war on terror and its impact on transnational and cross-cultural feminist alliances with women in the Muslim world. She studies gender, sexuality, and media production in war zones such as Afghanistan, exploring how these elements relate to feminist discourse on militarism and the liberation of Afghan women. Her recent work investigates how female military service members and veterans utilize digital media to advocate for themselves within the context of the war on terror. Her article, 'Feminism, Advocacy, the Military and Online Discourse in the War on Terror,' was published in Democratic Communique.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Social Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Theology
• Engineering
• Media studies
• Anthropology
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy
• Computer vision
• Telecommunications

Selected publications

• In here and out there: feminist militarism and U.S. presidential politics

  Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies · 2025-07-03

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Critical Intercultural View of War on Terror Militarism

  2023-12-14

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The story of the plight of Afghan women is one of the defining narratives of War on Terror era militarism in the early twenty first century. This chapter considers a critical intercultural perspective on the reporting done by non-Afghan women about Afghan women in 2001/2002 at the moment of the USs/allied invasion and also on the conversation circulating on social media, that includes Afghans, about Afghan women in 2021 at the moment of U.S. troop withdrawal. Doing so reveals a central tenet of the cultural production of knowledge about War on Terror militarism; the sustained belief that “Muslim culture” poses a singular and, ultimately, eternal threat to Western civilization and therefore, an eternal justification for warfare against Muslim majority nations and suspicion of Muslim minorities in non-Muslim nations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spotlight: Critical Media Pedagogies Scholarly Interest Group

  Journal of cinema and media studies · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Spotlight: Critical Media Pedagogies Scholarly Interest Group Isra Ali (bio), Lauren S. Berliner (bio), Stephanie Brown (bio), Sarah Choi (bio), Tanya Goldman (bio), Nicky Hentrich (bio), Regina Yung Lee (bio), and Samantha N. Sheppard This round table discussion reflects the primary goals of the Critical Media Pedagogies Scholarly Interest Group (SIG), which is dedicated to critical conversations about media pedagogy and the exchange of teaching resources. Nicky Hentrich: Let’s start with our origin story and why we believe the SIG’s mission is crucial in this current moment in higher education. Lauren Berliner: My first SIG meeting was in 2013, in a basement room of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference hotel. Only a handful of people were in attendance. It felt like a confessional—we joked that we were the people who secretly cared about teaching, even as we worried that our attention to pedagogy might be seen as a distraction by our colleagues or possible future employers. In 2016, I became co-chair (with Leah Shafer), and we changed the name of the SIG from Media Literacy and Pedagogical Outreach to Critical [End Page 1] Media Pedagogies. We have since seen a steady stream of new members. Today, our SIG focuses on all the parts of our name. Critical media pedagogy is about collectively conceptualizing knowledge production in the field. Our SIG is a place to wrestle with the often difficult, intertwining problems of media texts, changing institutional landscapes, relations of power in and outside of academic institutions, and how power operates in our classrooms and in the materials we use. Tanya Goldman: We’re encouraged to be inventive in our research. Why shouldn’t we approach pedagogy with this same spirit of invention and rigor? Hentrich: Which leads to the question, What are the politics of teaching, and how does the SIG inflect those? Isra Ali: Academics are rarely encouraged to think about the politics of our teaching as much as we are about the politics of our research. Politics are still operational in teaching contexts, though—perhaps more than in research—because they are less acknowledged. Regina Yung Lee: Yes! Our political commitments are lived out in our classrooms, on our syllabi, in how we structure our shared spaces, and through our assignments and our assessment methods. These can be passive policies about correct language use or active politics like a syllabus centered on media production by and for women of color. In the media studies classroom—which prioritizes sensory reproduction, viral spread, and embodied transmission—the politics of teaching have particularly visceral impacts. Sarah Choi: This focus on impacts structures how the SIG centers graduate student interests and initiatives. Finding a community of inspiring role models is a luxury in any field, yet I found one here in our SIG. As a junior scholar who upholds relationality as the primary component of teaching, I’ve perhaps learned more about this craft through our candid conversations on pedagogies and the support and encouragement we give one another—even over email—than any texts on pedagogical theory. From the beginning, I felt welcomed to contribute to the group and bring graduate students’ concerns and interests to the table, which helped launch Exploring Anti-Racist Pedagogies, a workshop series devoted to fostering discussions on equitable teaching practices. Our inaugural event was held virtually on February 22, 2022, and featured three University of Washington faculty members, including SIG member Regina Y. Lee. Goldman: I joined the steering committee before I defended my dissertation and immediately felt I was among peers rather than more senior colleagues. We are a non-hierarchical group, but we are attuned to structural impediments to critical pedagogy, especially as many of us work in institutional contexts that continue to devalue pedagogical labor within film and media studies. [End Page 2] Ali: To clarify, there is a distinction between institutional devaluation of pedagogically focused faculty and our own understandings of the power, value, purpose, and advancement of the field. Lee: It’s a matter of transmuting institutional values into less alienating, more familiar terms. At my institution (as at many others around the United States), the majority of teaching is carried out...

  PublisherDOI

• Muslim women meme-ing citizenship in the era of War on Terror militarism

  Quarterly Journal of Speech · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Facebook meme groups created by Muslim students at American universities are sites of intensive daily productivity, where members post memes they create, or share memes they find elsewhere, joking about the everyday lived experience of practicing Islam as part of a family, a community, and a society. Through the practice of making memes about Muslim piety, members of these groups articulate a form of cultural citizenship in Western liberal secular society through humor. Young Muslim women engaged in meme-making must contend with the intersections of gender and religion while making claims to American citizenship, doing the work of re-shaping belonging both in terms of American citizenship and in terms of Islamic practice and belief.

  PublisherDOI

• Sound of Guns: Digital Forensics of Gun Audio Samples meets Artificial Intelligence

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2020 · 3 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Classifying a weapon based on its muzzle blast is a challenging task that has significant applications in various security and military fields. Most of the existing works rely on ad-hoc deployment of spatially diverse microphone sensors to capture multiple replicas of the same gunshot, which enables accurate detection and identification of the acoustic source. However, carefully controlled setups are difficult to obtain in scenarios such as crime scene forensics, making the aforementioned techniques inapplicable and impractical. We introduce a novel technique that requires zero knowledge about the recording setup and is completely agnostic to the relative positions of both the microphone and shooter. Our solution can identify the category, caliber, and model of the gun, reaching over 90% accuracy on a dataset composed of 3655 samples that are extracted from YouTube videos. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of applying Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in gunshot classification eliminating the need for an ad-hoc setup while significantly improving the classification performance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The feminist futures of cultural studies

  Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Sociology

  The future of Critical Cultural Studies depends on the questions we have asked, are asking, and will ask. I hope that central to the present and future of critical cultural studies is the question: What is the “critical” project in Cultural Studies, today? The critical must evolve to consider how power adapts to critique, and to progress. Cultural Studies, Black, Post/ DeColonial, and Queer Feminist Studies, is a source of robust life for thinking about resistive politics in the wake of critique. Here, I use the concept of feminist militarism to gesture to the feminist futures of Critical Cultural Studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Documentary

  Feminist Media Histories · 2018-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The practice of feminist documentary filmmaking, and the scholarship it evokes in response, chart out the major fault lines of feminist theorizing and political activism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scholarship on early feminist documentary practice in the mid-twentieth century is told in two stories. In one, Third World–ist revolutionary cinema movements of the mid-twentieth century in East Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East created a “cinematic counter-telling” in which women and feminists were visible participants, and feminist concerns were framed in terms of an anticolonial message: “The Third World and its diasporas in the First World have rewritten histories as their own, taken control over their own images, spoken in their own voices, reclaiming and re-accentuating colonialism and its ramifications in the present in a vast project of remapping and renaming.”1 The other story told is that of a burgeoning feminist First World cinema movement examining the economic and social frameworks of the daily lives of women, and their identities, within a domestic context: “For the first time, ‘women's films’ denoted films made by and for, not just starring or about, women and emerging out of the political fever and radical demands of the women's movement…. Female audiences filled auditoriums, classrooms, and town halls as films made by women began to circulate as a result of newly formed distribution collectives such as New Day Films, Iris Films, and the Women's Film Coop.”2These stories of documentary film's emergence within different radical political movements illustrate how the first generation of global feminist documentary films created visible categories of women as filmmakers, distributors, and audiences, and defined them in explicitly political terms. Black women have used documentary from the 1960s onward to tell their own stories. Of Madeline Anderson's I Am Somebody (1969), documenting the 113-day strike of Black women hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina, Jacqueline Bobo writes, “Anderson's documentary remains visible evidence of Black women's ability to resist inhumane treatment and … how the women began to recognize that they were valuable even as others were aligned in a concerted effort to prove that they were not.”3First-generation US filmmakers rooted in the women's liberation movement embraced documentary realism as a form that stood in contrast to the artificiality of studio feature filmmaking: “The ‘real’ in the Feminist Film Movement thus marks both an aesthetic experiment and a political commitment.”4 The “real” worked in service of “what was at the time a current and radical political argument concerning women's self-discovery as a route toward feminist collective identity and political action,” and the use of women's liberation activism and consciousness raising to do so.5 “Realism” as style and practice soon faced criticism from other feminists. While a few feminist theorists, such as Julia Lesage, Annette Kuhn, and B. Ruby Rich, pointed to the virtues of realist documentary, Claire Johnston, Elaine McGarry, and others argued that early feminist realist documentaries naively reinscribed the very ideological frameworks and relationships they sought to disrupt. They advocated for a women's “counter-cinema,” embracing the experimental as a means of introducing ideological alternatives.6By the turn of the twenty-first century, the debate had come full circle. Alexandra Juhasz and Shilyh Warren argued that feminist film theory's disavowal of the realist documentary in the 1980s and 1990s, encapsulated by the theoretical turn to psychoanalysis in the work of Laura Mulvey, allowed the political stakes of feminist documentary to fall away, oversimplifying the relationship between filmmaker, film, and the “real.” They pointed out that “realism” can and does “testify to alternative, marginal, subversive, or illegal realities; it can critique the notion of reality.”7 The “feminist realist debates” of the 1970s laid the foundation for First World feminist film theory, positioning realist American feminist documentary film as inferior to European feminist avant-garde filmmaking.8In the 1990s, bell hooks's intersectional analysis of the seminal LGBTQ documentary Paris Is Burning (1990), portraying the experiences of mostly Black and Hispanic queer men participating in drag ball culture in New York, claimed that the film idealizes white femininity. By positioning herself as “absent,” Jennie Livingston, a white queer filmmaker, engaged in appropriation, evoking the racism of historical ethnographic films.9 Judith Butler responded to hooks's critique, extending her exposition of performativity. Paris Is Burning, she wrote, “documents neither an efficacious insurrection, nor a painful resubordination…. This is an appropriation that seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over that is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and as performance, which repeats in order to remake—and sometimes succeeds.”10 The spectator is central to both. For Butler, ambivalence about the performance and embodiment on view in the film is possible for the spectator. hooks, on the other hand, precludes such a disruption for the spectator as she recounts her experience of viewing the film: “I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight-acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates ‘whiteness.’”11Also in the 1990s, postcolonial feminist documentary scholarship took up spectatorship and the documentary as ethnographic film, in the context of the transnational and warfare. Fatimah Tobing Rony looked back to Nanook of the North (1922), directed by Robert J. Flaherty, long considered the first ethnographic art and documentary film, which was distributed and utilized as an educational tool, to disrupt the construction of both the Inuit as primitive, and nonfiction cinema as a mode of representation that “could only be truthful,” in order to show “how the film represents a paradigm for a mode of representing indigenous peoples which parallels the romantic primitivism of modern anthropology.”12 Of the evolution of anthropological filmmaking, “Filmed ethnographic material, which was thought to ‘replicate natural perception,’ has now renounced its authority to replicate only to purport to provide adequate ‘data’ for the ‘sampling’ of culture,” wrote Trinh T. Minh-ha in 1993. “Thus, the recording and gathering of data and of people's testimonies are considered to be the limited aim of ‘ethnographic film.’” As such, “The claim to objectivity may no longer stand in anthropological circles, but its authority is likely to be replaced by the sacrosanct notion of the ‘scientific.’”13 Minh-ha, Tobing Rony, and other postcolonial feminist scholars of documentary film speak back to the “fathers of documentary” not only as the potential indigenous subjects of ethnographic film, but also as critical practitioners; Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) by Minh-ha is one example. “By putting representation under scrutiny, textual theory-practice has more likely helped to upset rooted ideologies by bringing the workings of their mechanics to the fore,” Minh-ha argues. “It contributes to the questioning of reformist ‘alternative’ approaches that never quite depart from the lineage of white- and male-centered humanism.”14This problematic is reinvigorated in feminist documentary scholarship on humanitarian and human rights documentary in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and the “digital.” Faye Ginsburg warns against overdetermining the digital with liberatory potential, through which one might remake the relationship between filmmaker, indigenous subject, and the “real.” “This techno-imaginary universe,” she argues, “reinscribes … the illusion that these remote ‘others’ exist in a time not contemporary with our own, effectively restratifying the world along lines of late modernity despite the utopian promises made by ‘digerati’ of the possibilities of a twenty-first-century McLuhanesque global village.”15 Pooja Rangan and Wendy S. Hesford are similarly wary of specific techniques of human rights documentary that are often attempts to center the indigenous subject, as part of a critical awareness of the limits of earlier ethnographic films.16The humanitarian and/or human rights documentary is tasked with eliciting the sympathies of the spectator, potentially mobilizing them to action. In this context, Rangan asks, “What does endangered life do for documentary?” and “What is the gift of documentary?”17 Rangan and Hesford both consider the Academy Award–winning documentary Born into Brothels (2004), which recognizes the agency of its Indian child subjects by allowing them to tell their own stories directly to the camera. And yet, Hesford argues, “their rhetorical agency is nonetheless framed by an unequal relationship between the filmmakers, the children, and their families.”18 The white “photojournalist turned advocate” and filmmaker Zana Briski is positioned “as savior,” using a universalizing liberal narrative of education and empowerment, as Briski tries to get all the children enrolled in a boarding school. In turn, the film presents the children's uneducated, superstitious, and sometimes violent families as obstacles to their social mobility, rather than as the consequence of systemic poverty.19 Rangan grapples with modes of documentary making designed to give over the act of representation to their subjects, including first-person voice-over, and the “humanitarian impulse of giving the camera to the other,” the “gift” of documentary, by asking what documentary solicits in return.20 Rangan, Hesford, and Ginsburg remain wary of the project of humanization and its implicit call for external intervention. The discussion of the digital and of human rights filmmaking in the twenty-first century continues to organize feminist scholarship on documentary around tensions that are familiar to and reverberate across feminist theorizations and activisms of the moment, through and about representation and power.

  PublisherDOI

• Surgical management of pelvic organ prolapse and stress urinary incontinence: where are we now?

  International Urogynecology Journal · 2017-08-30 · 7 citations

  editorial1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tactical Tactility: Warfare, Gender, and Cultural Intelligence

  2016-04-22 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The participation of women in the landscape of warfare is increasingly visible; nowhere is this more evident than in the US military’s global endeavors.  The US military’s reliance on cultural intelligence in its conceptualization of engagement strategies has resulted in the articulation of specific gendered roles in warfare. Women are thought to be particularly well suited to non-violent tactile engagements with civilians in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan because of gender segregation in public and private spaces.  Women in the military have consequently been able to argue for recognition of their combat service by framing this work in the war zone as work only women can do.  Women reporters have been able to develop profiles as media producers, commentators, and experts on foreign policy, women, and the military by producing intimate stories about the lives of civilians only they can access.  The work soldiers and reporters do is located in the warzone, but in the realms of the domestic and social, in the periods between bursts of violent engagement.  These women are deployed as mediators between civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq and occupying forces for different but related purposes.  Soldiers do the auxiliary work of combat in these encounters, reporters produce knowledge that undergirds the military project.  Their work in combat zones emphasizes the interpersonal and relational as forms of tactile engagement.  In these roles, they are also often mediating between the “temporary” infrastructure of the war zone and occupation, and the “permanent” infrastructure of nation state, local government, and community.  The work women do as soldiers and reporters operates effectively with the narrative of militarism as a means for liberating women, reinforcing the perception of the military as an institution that is increasingly progressive in its attitudes towards membership, and in its military strategies.  When US military strategy focuses on cultural practice in Arab and Muslim societies, commanders operationalize women soldiers in the tactics of militarism, the liberation of Muslim women becomes central in news and governmental discourses alike, and the notion of “feminism” is drawn into the project of US militarism in Afghanistan and Iraq in complex ways that elucidate how gender, equality, and difference, can be deployed in service of warfare.

  PublisherDOI

• Sepsis, Hepatitis and Acute Renal Failure with Herpes Esophagitis in Immunocompetent Patient

  The American Journal of Gastroenterology · 2016-10-01

  article

  INTRODUCTION: HSV esophagitis is an opportunistic infection in immunocompromised or severely ill patients. HSV sepsis and esophagitis is a rare disease in immunocompetent patients with high mortality. CASE: A 44 years old man with history significant for GERD presented with complains of nausea, several episodes of coffee ground emesis and abdominal pain since 2-3 days. Patient was in his usual state of health 3 days ago, he suddenly experienced moderate intensity, crampy upper abdominal pain associated with nausea and several episodes of emesis. Patient also reported odynophagia and dysphagia. Denied history of fever, chills, altered bowel moments, alcoholism, sick contacts or recent travel history. Patient was hemodynamically stable, examination was significant for generalized abdominal tenderness. At admission labs were significant for leukocytosis [WBC: 25300], anion gap metabolic acidosis [AG: 25.7], elevated BUN and creatinine [76 & 2.7 respectively], and elevated LFTs [AST: 471, ALT: 227 & total bilirubin 1.24], lactate [6.0]. CT abdomen and pelvis without contrast was unremarkable. Patient was admitted in the ICU, resuscitated with IV hydration and started on pantoprazole infusion, and ondansetron. Hepatitis panel, HIV serology was negative and US abdomen unremarkable. Gastroenterology was consulted and endoscopy was done to rule out peptic ulcer disease, Mallory-Weiss tear, and gastritis. EGD was significant for LA grade D esophagitis (one or more mucosal breaks involving at least 75% of esophageal circumference). Biopsy showed ulcerative esophagitis with herpes simplex viral inclusions, negative for eosinophilic esophagitis and dysplasia. Diagnosis of HSV esophagitis was made and patient was treated with IV acyclovir. DISCUSSION: HSV infection affects immunocompromised, immunosuppressed or pregnant women in the third trimester. HSV sepsis and esophagitis in healthy adults is rare phenomena with mortality rates up to 90%. Herpetic esophagitis in healthy adults has been reported often. However, till date only 2 case reports of HSV sepsis and esophagitis have been published in literature. While herpetic esophagitis is self-limiting infection, treatment with parenteral acyclovir may reverse the disease process and dramatically improve survival if instituted early. CONCLUSION: HSV sepsis is potential treatable disease if recognized early and should be suspected in a case of sepsis without evident cause, even in an immunocompetent patient

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Simone Raponi

  North Atlantic Treaty Organization

  1 shared

• Regina Yung Lee

  1 shared

• Sarah Choi

  Royal North Shore Hospital

  1 shared

• Gabriele Oligeri

  Qatar Foundation

  1 shared

• Nicky Hentrich

  1 shared

• Hussam AlJandali

  Wayne State University

  1 shared

• Khalid Zakaria

  1 shared

• Maliha Naseer

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Louis Bevier Dissertation Fellowship from Rutgers University