Discourses of Ideology and Identity: Social Media and the Irani .9781138548763

Taylor & Francis

In this monograph, Chris Featherman adopts a discourse analytical approach to explore the ways in which social movement ideologies and identities are discursively constructed in new and old media. In the context of his argument, Featherman also considers current debates surrounding the role that technologies play in democracy-building and global activist networks. He engages these critical issues through a case study of the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests, looking at both US legacy media coverage of the protests as well as activists\u2019 use of social media. Through qualitative analysis of a corpus of activists\u2019 Twitter tweets and Flickr uploads, Featherman argues that activists\u2019 social media discourses and protesters\u2019 symbolic and tactical borrowing of global English contribute to micronarratives of globalization, while also calling into question master narratives about Iran commonly found in mainstream Western media accounts. This volume makes a timely c.