Courtney C. Radsch

Courtney Radsch (born 1979) is an American journalist, author and free expression advocate. She is currently the advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists and author of Cyberactivism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt: Digital Dissidence and Political Change. She has written and been interviewed extensively about digital activism and social media in the Middle East since 2006.

Dr. Radsch is an internationally recognized expert on social media, citizen journalism, and activism and is frequently invited to comment about new media and the Middle East. She has appeared on CNN, Al Jazeera,MSNBC among other international outlets. Radsch also appeared in the PBS Frontline documentary Revolution in Egypt. She is the author of Cyberactivism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt: Digital Dissidence and Political Change (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

Radsch’s work on cyberactivism in the Egypt and the Middle East has been widely published and she is frequently asked to speak on the subject. Radsch is one of the earliest proponents of the political impact of cyberactivism in the Middle East and analysts of Arab media. As early as 2006 Radsch was writing about the revolutionary impact of blogging and social media in Egypt; in 2006 she presented a paper entitled “The Revolution Will be Blogged: New Media Cultural Configurations” at a conference in Cairo. Radsch’s Arab Media blog, started in 2006, is one of the longest-running blogs on the topic. Radsch is the author of several book chapters about cyberactivism, social media and the Middle East.

In Core the Commonplace she traced the development of cyberactivism in Egypt, arguing that there were three distinct phases in the development of blogging: experimentation, activism and diversification and that blogging was having a significant political impact. Her extensive ethnographic research on Egyptian cyberactivism provides a unique insight into the antecedents of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. In her chapter on the blogosphere and social media in a study by the Stimson Center, Seismic Shift: Understanding Change in the Middle East she argues that between 2005 and 2010 Middle Eastern blogs and social media showed rising dissatisfaction with the status quo, declining levels of fear and visible capability to mobilize large political protests.

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