#Stand with women in Afghanistan: Civic participation, symbolism, and morality in political activism on Twitter

IF 2.1 2区 文学 Q2 COMMUNICATION Discourse & Communication Pub Date : 2023-05-30 DOI:10.1177/17504813231174802
Gwen Bouvier, David Machin
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Abstract

At the time of writing, it had become common to find trending social media hashtags where users were expressing their feelings about current social and political issues through a range of symbolic gestures, such as striking a pose, wearing a garment, or changing their personal icon. Scholars had begun to consider such gestures in regard to whether they constitute a meaningful form of civic participation or activism. In the present paper, we seek to contribute to this literature by using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine the contents of one Twitter hashtag where users participate in this form of activism: #StandWithWomenlnAfghanistan. Aligning with emerging scholarship on the nature of online affective publics, the analysis shows that those tweeting do not align with clear and specific issues, causalities, or solutions based on contextual understanding. On the one hand, symbolic gestures can be thought of as vernaculars that support a heterogeneous, fuzzy, and incoherent set of meanings. Yet on the other hand, across the posts using this hashtag, we find a discourse where injustice and solutions are based on notions of individual identity and freedom of expression rooted in the liberal democratic traditions of the European Enlightenment, here brought to bear on the hugely diverse and specific lives of women in Afghanistan. For many scholars, it is such ethnocentrism that underpins the very imperialist imagining of Afghanistan that led to, and legitimized, the invasion and occupation in the first place.
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#与阿富汗妇女站在一起:推特政治活动中的公民参与、象征主义和道德
在撰写本文时,在社交媒体上发现热门话题标签已经很常见了,用户通过一系列象征性的动作来表达他们对当前社会和政治问题的感受,比如摆姿势、穿衣服或更换个人图标。学者们已经开始考虑这种姿态是否构成一种有意义的公民参与或行动主义形式。在本文中,我们试图通过使用多模态批评话语分析来研究用户参与这种形式的行动主义的一个Twitter标签的内容:#与阿富汗妇女站在一起。与新兴的关于网络情感公众本质的学术研究一致,该分析表明,这些推文与明确而具体的问题、因果关系或基于上下文理解的解决方案并不一致。一方面,象征性手势可以被认为是支持异质、模糊和不连贯的意义集合的方言。但另一方面,透过使用此标签的贴文,我们发现不公义与解决方法,都是基于个人认同与言论自由的观念,这些观念根植于欧洲启蒙运动的自由民主传统,而阿富汗妇女的生活则极为多元与特殊。对许多学者来说,正是这种种族中心主义支撑了帝国主义对阿富汗的想象,并使入侵和占领合法化。
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来源期刊
Discourse & Communication
Discourse & Communication COMMUNICATION-
CiteScore
3.30
自引率
5.30%
发文量
41
期刊介绍: Discourse & Communication is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles that pay specific attention to the qualitative, discourse analytical approach to issues in communication research. Besides the classical social scientific methods in communication research, such as content analysis and frame analysis, a more explicit study of the structures of discourse (text, talk, images or multimedia messages) allows unprecedented empirical insights into the many phenomena of communication. Since contemporary discourse study is not limited to the account of "texts" or "conversation" alone, but has extended its field to the study of the cognitive, interactional, social, cultural.
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