Samira Hamza almost never stops thinking about her audience. The Egyptian journalist began her career as a translator for a media research institute that analyzes how global media talk about the Arab world. She later became a translator and then senior editor for the Egyptian edition of National Geographic Magazine, where one of her favorite responsibilities was deciding which stories from the magazine’s English-language edition would resonate with her Egyptian young-adult readers. In that role, she says, she aimed to do more than just translate stories; she wanted to localize the science — to tie it to familiar cultural identifiers and on-the-ground realities — in order to make the issues relevant and accessible to people in her region.
Hamza now works as the head of visual research for the online show “Al-Daheeh” — which translates, in English, to “The Nerd.” There, she uses visual storytelling to make science accessible to general audiences across the Arab Region. She believes that the show’s viewers deserve accurate portrayals of science-related events, and she spends a lot of time fact-checking and researching the backstory of historic images.
This fall, Hamza became the second journalist ever selected for the Knight Science Journalism Program’s Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East Fellowship. The one-semester fellowship was formed in partnership with Springer Nature to honor the late Egyptian science journalist Mohammed Yahia, for whom Hamza has expressed great admiration.
I recently sat down with Hamza on two occasions to discuss how she’s using her time here at MIT, her fascination with transformation, and how she sees her role as a science communicator in the Middle East. Our conversations, below, have been edited for length and clarity.
Lucie McCormick: You are here doing a semester-long fellowship through KSJ for journalists from the Middle East and Africa. Can you share a little about the work you are focusing on?
Samira Hamza: Since I focus on audience psychology, I built a curriculum of courses about cognitive neuroscience and cognition, neurobiology of self, and so on. I also take courses about data and information visualization, computation and expression, and the history of science.
I care a lot about the audience; I usually picture the viewers and readers that consume my stories as if they are my parents, or my nieces, because my mom and dad are illiterate. So whenever I write something I ask, Would my dad read it? Or if I talk to him about it, would he understand? If he wouldn’t, I won’t write it or I would rephrase it to be accessible to him. That’s why I like the show I’m working at now in Egypt, because it has this wide spectrum of audience. We are trying to simplify, to say something through the storytelling.
LM: I’m curious how the relationship between data visualization and cognitive neuroscience unfolds in your work. With your background focusing on audience and visualization, do you feel like you’re seeing differences in how audiences behave in different parts of the world?
SH: I always have in my mind that not everything I learn here could apply the same way to my audience. For example, in one class I’m taking, we talked about climate change. Who is the most affected in the category of climate change? Farmers and rural people.
But we [in the Middle East] are still in the phase of convincing [people] they have a hand in climate change, and a hand in a solution. This is why the visuals have a big role in this. Because whenever you have a story about climate change, you have photos of the glaciers in Antarctica melting, or of a polar bear alone on the side of an iceberg. This is irrelevant for my audience: We are living in a semi-arid region. We don’t want our readers to think “it’s the first world’s problem, not ours.”
So if you are going to talk about climate change, talk to them about the crops. Talk to them about how coastal cities could drown. You have to talk to them [through] their interests, not just deliver the facts as they are.
LM: So when you’re doing translational work, you’re not only translating words, you are translating ideas as well.
SH: I’m localizing. I’m trying to localize; even when I translate a whole story from its origin, first I choose a story that’s relevant, and also tell them how it would [show up] in our society.
In the digital show I work on now, we localize the tone of voice when discussing complex scientific concepts. We do this in various ways, such as having a comedy content writer, because humor is an integral part of our culture.
LM: How do you see your role as a science journalist communicating to audiences outside your region?
SH: To challenge prevailing misconceptions and implicit biases about my region by offering accurate, evidence-based, and context-rich reporting.
LM: I am curious what it’s like to be here at this moment where the U.S. is not the most hospitable to people who are immigrating.
SH: I think maybe it’s my destiny to be here in this time to speak up, about my existence, my region, my country, my gender, because even if women are underrepresented all over the world, women from my background are even more marginalized and less visible, and that’s why sharing my voice feels important.
So yeah, I think it gives me a responsibility to gain as much as I can in only one semester — that’s why I have a bunch of classes — and go back as Samira, who, I don’t want to say is different from the Samira that came, but Samira that has something extra, a wider horizon. So I’m trying to do my best.
I started with translation, and I’m trying now to simplify information and visualize everything. When I look at all of these, I think there is something common between them. I like transformation. That’s why I like writing — I transform my thoughts to words. I like translating — I transform words from one language to another. I like simplifying information — that’s totally transformation. And then visualization is transformation from written to visual.
I think that what motivated me for all of this is my passion for transformation. I’ve long been captivated by butterflies because they are the symbol of transformation from phase to phase even if their life is very short. My time here with KSJ is short, too, and I want to have a hand in transforming the scene of science journalism in my region.
LM: What do you think is next for you?
SH: Next for me is most likely to go back to Egypt and pass on this experience. I don’t want it to be just the few of us science journalists in the region. I want us to have momentum and a wider network that interacts with each other, and inspires each other, so we tell a broader variety of stories. And I think having fresh blood can help.
Lucie McCormick is a documentary filmmaker, an astrophotographer, and a current student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. Her reporting focuses on the intersections of science and social issues.
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