Territorial imagination: social media, visual images, and affect in Iranian Kurdistan

Abstract

Thousands of Iranian Kurds took to the streets in October 2014 in solidarity with the Syrian Kurds’ resistance against the so-called Islamic State (IS), and again in September 2017 to support Iraqi Kurds’ independence referendum. The demonstrations were momentous, given their size, scope, and defiance of the Iranian state’s security measures aimed at suppressing manifestations of Kurdish identity on the streets and on social media. This article examines the use of social media during the demonstrations. Specifically, it investigates how Iranian Kurds utilized social media and visual images to situate the demonstrations within the larger Kurdish resistance in the region and frame the Kurdish movement spatially. Deploying digital methods and poststructural discourse analysis, the article examines a small set of social media posts and draws on semi-structured interviews to deepen and contextualize the analysis. Findings illustrate the role of affect and emotion in enabling bodies to connect, resist the state’s securitized territoriality, and produce a particular territorial imagination – one that foregrounds Kurdistan as a meaningful non-state geopolitical construct. The article emphasizes the mutually constitutive relations between the affective-emotional and the discursive-symbolic by foregrounding users’ agency in connecting with social media and visual images. Highlighting the production of minoritized territorial imaginations, the paper contributes to the literature on social media, visuality, and space.