Why subscribe?
Because the information landscape is moving faster than most frameworks can follow — and the gap between what’s happening and what’s being reported, analyzed, and acted on keeps widening.
Unembedded exists to close that gap. Sharp, evidence-based analysis and practice resources at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability. Written for people doing the work, and for anyone paying close enough attention to want to understand it.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
What you get:
Every new essay and practice resource delivered directly to your inbox. Full access to the archive. Audio features via the Substack app. Access to community discussion and The Field — a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, lawyers, advocates, and technologists working at this intersection.
What’s publishing here:
What’s publishing here:
The Safari Is Over, a multi-part essay series that uses the manosphere as a lens to examine something larger: the media systems, economic conditions, institutional failures, and structural forces that produced it, and that continue to reproduce harm across every domain we’d rather not look at too closely. The manosphere is the entry point. It is not the destination. Currently publishing: Inside the Manosphere I, II, III, IV.
The Field Dispatch, practice resources, guides, and working intelligence for practitioners who need the analysis to become actionable. Currently publishing: Killing Spectacle: 15 Shifts for Reporting on Online Harm and Extremism Without Reproducing It, a comprehensive guide across framing, verification, structure, and sustained practice inside institutions that don’t always reward it. Additional guides forthcoming on parachute journalism, language and frame-breaking, ecosystem mapping, and protecting burden-bearers in high-risk reporting.
A Letter to the Field: From Your Arab American Colleague Who Is Done Waiting, a direct address to journalists, human rights practitioners, lawyers, technologists, and donors about what my community built while the professional class was looking away, what the system took from it, and what genuine recalibration actually requires. Coming soon.
More series in development on platform power and the evidentiary record, the humanitarian industrial complex, media and genocide, and the politics of who gets to name reality.
About the writer:
Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, technology, evidence, and power. Strategist, advisor, trainer, and writer with fourteen years leading crisis response, documentation, and capacity building across MENA and global contexts. Previously at WITNESS — 2024 Peabody Global Impact Award recipient. Founder of The Field and Arab Hyphenated.
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