Worldmaking in the Age of Streaming

A study led by Annenberg Professor Aswin Punathambekar examines how Muslim creators are using shows on Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, and Peacock to move beyond tokenistic diversity by building entire cultural worlds — through music, language, and transnational collaboration — that reimagine what it means to be Muslim in the West.

Does representation in mainstream media deliver the social change it promises? Or have we mistaken visibility for progress, celebrating symbolic inclusion while systemic inequalities remain firmly in place? 

Propelled by these questions, the study by Punathambekar and his co-authors attempts to go beyond an emphasis on representation in media, turning instead to the idea of worldmaking in order to “make representation matter anew.” 

As shows like Netflix’s Mo, Hulu's Ramy, Disney+'s Ms. Marvel, Channel 4's We Are Lady Parts, and the BBC's Man Like Mobeen make breakthroughs in media representation — specifically around “Muslimness” — “they also represent a unique moment in media history, defined by streaming services and social media,” said Punathambekar.

Drawing from the work of media sociologist Herman Gray, the authors — which include Julia Giese of Loughborough University, Diwas Bisht of University of Salford, and Annenberg doctoral student Sim Gill — analyze the link between media representation, as seen in these shows, and social change, in a paper titled “Streaming video and diasporic worldmaking: Race, ethnicity, and religion in the Anglophone West,” published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies. The study is one of three that look at race, ethnicity, and gender in the UK, funded by the British Academy. 

“We focused on these shows because while they neatly remained within corporate diversity agendas and cynical marketing, they also transcended box-ticking and tokenism,” said Giese.

The researchers were also interested in the way these shows depicted cultural specificity within popular genres “that can expand notions of belonging and citizenship.”

After 9/11, entertainment television played a major role in how U.S. and British media portrayed national identity and belonging, particularly around Arabs and Muslims. However, the authors argue that these masked darker motives. “What these stories did successfully was frame the United States as a diverse nation united in the ‘war on terror’ — everyone could be part of this new national imaginary except for Arabs and Muslims.”

Later, amid the rise of online video platforms like YouTube and the globalization of media through streaming services, creators such as Guz Khan and Nida Manzoor emerged as important diasporic voices reshaping Muslim representation. Khan, who began his career on YouTube, used comedy to address issues of race, religion, and belonging in Britain, culminating in the series Man Like Mobeen. Similarly, Manzoor’s We Are Lady Parts became a success in the streaming sector by capturing multicultural life in East London.

“Khan and Manzoor’s worldmaking offers a glimpse into a reality not merely imagined but actively composed: one that emerges through lived experience and gives rise to social and political connection,” said Gill. “Crucially, this world does not aspire to coherence or resolution. Instead, it is formed through messiness, contradiction, and ongoing negotiation, where meaning is continually remade and relationality becomes both the method and the unfinished struggle of living together.”

The authors argue that their work “also reveals the significance of trans-Atlantic ties, especially in terms of distribution.” This combination of diasporic stories viewed on diasporic mediums extends to shows like Mo, Ramy, and Ms. Marvel. They range from the everyday experiences of Palestinian Americans and Egyptian Americans — to, yes, superheroes. 

“From music selection, design choices, casting, and the narrative explorations of complicated histories, a show like Ms. Marvel, created by British Pakistani Bisha K. Ali, shows how streaming video on demand services facilitate new networks in production culture,” said Punathambekar. 

This study is a part of Punathambekar’s longstanding work analyzing new media, global media, and their role in the production of national, racial, and ethnic identities. Specifically, this work came out of a four-year research project, which was a part of Punathambekar’s appointment as British Academy Global Professor from 2020 to 2024, which included this new co-authored study, as well as papers on British broadcasting between the 1960s and ‘80s and the unfolding impact of social media on race, ethnicity, and gender.

In their paper, “Public service media and race relations in postcolonial Britain: BBC and immigrant programming, 1965–1988,” Punathambekar, Giese, and Bisht drew on BBC archival materials to explore the politics of race during these formative years in media history. This was a period that saw the first steps toward accommodating immigrant narratives, especially those of the Caribbean and Asian communities, but was often impeded by senior managers. 

Continuing their research on the politics of race, ethnicity, and gender in the U.K., the authors went on to look at social media in their paper “Curating new ethnicities in a digital era: Women and media work in the British South Asian diaspora,” where they also focused on theories of mainstream media visibility, specifically its advantages and drawbacks. They concluded that digital creators walk a line: their online personas are shaped by brand demands, but they can also push back against the limits of representation.

After publishing these three peer-reviewed articles, they have secured a book contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. Titled Mixed Signals: Television, British Asians, and the Promise of Belonging, the book explores  “how the oscillation between visibility and erasure, and between the promise of belonging and its repeated deferral or betrayal, has structured the televisual imagination of South Asian communities in Britain,” Punathambekar said. 

The book will trace the cultural history of television and the making of British Asian culture and identity by looking at early BBC documentaries, British comedies of the 1990s, reality television, and the streaming shows and social media platforms of today.