Before Vision 2030: Negotiating Modernity Through Media in Everyday Life

This preprint examines how young Arab women in Saudi Arabia negotiated modernity and social advancement through everyday engagement with transnational television in the late 2000s. Drawing on interviews and group discussions from the author’s doctoral research, it shows how participants evaluated media content within moral frameworks shaped by religious and social norms, selectively aligning with some representations while distancing others. The article argues that later transformations associated with Vision 2030 are better understood as developments grounded in prior everyday interpretive negotiations rather than as abrupt cultural rupture.