CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Shamsi, Azadeh |
|---|---|
| Title | Digital Feminist Activism and Imagining the Future: Case Study of the Women, Life, Freedom Movement in Iran |
| Summary | This research investigates Iranian women’s imagination of the future by focusing on the politics of affect and emotion and the experience of doing digital feminist activism during the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran. The death of Mahsa Jina Amini, in September 2022, sparked a massive street protest in Iran, primarily led by women. Alongside massive street protests in large and small cities across the country, digital media platforms remained a crucial part of the uprising. Jina’s tragic death brought up different emotions: anger, sadness, despair, and hope. People, specifically women, started to talk about their experiences, their emotions, and memories of inequality and violence in recent decades on social media platforms. The focus of this project is on how through this emotion sharing, affective publics or counterpublics, enabled by the affordances of digital media, shaped Iranian women’s imagination of future. In order to do so, I adopt an ethnographic approach in this research. Because of the complexity and multilayeredness of Iranian women's media engagement, this research adopted a mixed method approach including discourse analysis of 100 tweets posted on Twitter by Iranian women and 8 semi-structured in-depth interviews with women who are active on social media platforms. Through critical discourse analysis of 100 textual and visual Tweets published on Farsi Twitter in the first eight months after the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, I traced mourning, anger, remembrance, joy, and hope as the main shared emotions. |
| Supervisor | Nadia Jones-Gailani |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/shamsi_azadeh.pdf |
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