What is ProgressME Magazine?
Introducing ourselves. Again.
by Anthony Berteaux, Web Editor and Co-founder of ProgressME Magazine
In the fall of 2015, Ben Gladstone and I founded ProgressME Magazine with a single goal: to offer a space (a safe space, if you will) for progressive college students to express and explore their views about the Middle East — a region that has increasingly become part of the global conversation on human rights.
As we wrote in our mission statement, ProgressME Magazine was going to be a place where we drew “attention to little discussed issues in the region.” We would be a place where college students could voice their own opinions and experiences in essays, short blog posts or long form, narrative writing.
And, in our first year, we published a series of thought-provoking pieces that fulfilled our mission. In ProgressME’s first issue, Alana Bannourah wrote a piece about dating as a Palestinian-Arab, Renee Bunn wrote about her emotional Birthright Armenia experiences and Medea Jaff wrote about her family’s excruciating decision to leave Baghdad during the First Gulf war. The following months we would see pieces that forced us to view struggle and identity in the Middle East with a new light — such as Ben and Alana’s piece on Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. Our writers would analyze Western media’s role in perpetuating Islamophobia, the lasting impact of the 2006 Palestinian elections and counter-terrorism efforts in a globalized world.
Now we are on Medium and we would like to continue the conversation we started last semester by inviting new voices to join us in exploring these complex issues. If you have an opinion, a narrative or a specific issue in the Middle East that you would like to shine more light on, we invite you to apply as a writer for the 2016–2017 year. Topics may include gender and sexuality issues, minority rights, peace initiatives, and more. Contributing writers are encouraged to send us ideas that are unique, new, and/or unpopular in the American policy conversation, and to highlight issues and populations that are minimally discussed. Please note that we are looking for topics having to do with the entire Middle East, not only Israel/Palestine.
Unlike other publications, we will not compare your work to that of professional academics and politicians — your submissions compete only with your fellow college students’. While academic journals and think tanks provide an important service by publicizing the work of professional experts, college students also have valuable ideas and experiences to contribute to the policy discussion, and it is our mission at ProgressME to give expression to those voices.
These posts are published once a month on our website and Facebook page to call our readers’ attention to important events and to provide explanations for ongoing issues. They pull from sources including Al Arabiya (owned by a Saudi broadcaster but headquartered in the United Arab Emirates), Al Jazeera (owned largely by the Qatari royal family), Al Ahram (owned largely by the Egyptian government), Ma’an (a non-governmental Palestinian news agency), IRNA (the official news agency of the Iranian government), Rudaw (a Kurdish media network headquartered in Erbil, Southern Kurdistan), and Haaretz (a non-governmental, left-leaning Israeli daily).
If you are interested in being a ProgressME Magazine writer for the 2016–2017 year you contact me at aberteaux13@gmail.com and we can get you started!
