Dismantling Our Voices as Palestinian Students
Abdul Rahman Jarour, 22, lives in Gaza City and is in his fifth year of computer engineering and communications at Al Azahar University in Gaza.
Abdul Rahman has a great passion for social media, where he has been very active since he studied digital and video production to document the Dynamic Futures activities, mostly the Virtual Majlis that he has been a part of since the very beginning, whether it’s using his laptop to tweet some of the hot topics raised in the meeting, recording the session to produce interesting clips or directly as a facilitator.
His talents have reflected on guiding and encouraging his fellow Al Fakhoora students to use Twitter and Facebook in their campaigns and he was among the first students that believed that social media can do a lot if used correctly, in reflecting the reality of life in Gaza accurately and the people that live there.
“My passion for social media and filming started with a training we received with Scander Copti, the Palestinian director, who inspired us how to think about media efficiency as an advocacy tool. His training via Skype was so interesting, and we saw that borders and the blockade were being broken by these new communication tools.” Abdul Rahman said.
Having an active Twitter account, Abdul Rahman says “I use my account to raise my voice about life in Gaza. I work with other Al Fakhoora students on #virtualmajlis and also #Palestinerefugee for the International Refugees Day, to bring attention towards the unjust siege and how, as students, we are affected badly - I was happy to find that over 20 students participated with us on these campaigns.”
Abdul Rahman added “I have attended two workshops on Twitter, one of them by Basma Awad, a fellow Al Fakhoora student and social media expert, and the other one by Tim from the World in Conversation Project at Penn State University, both of which have been as a part of Al Fakhoora’s activities. Both developed my experience, and I think these are very important skills to acquire, particularly as Palestinians who should be active on social media to highlight the different issues within the Palestinian Community – Retweeting and sharing our tweets has been such an interesting experience especially when we look at and dismantle our voices as students from Palestine.”
