As technology-enhanced polarization shakes societies across the world, social movements, activists, and state critics are in the constant search for new tools of visibility and legitimization. Such a quest is particularly relevant in the Arab Levant, a post-colonial context where ideological divisions are exacerbated by questions of national identity and authenticity, and social movements are often delegitimized as mere neo-imperialist projects.
This paper examines the visual digital strategies of social movements in the Arab Levant within a social media critical discourse perspective (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). The data consists of a corpus of over one-hundred memes drawn from the public Facebook and Instagram accounts of thirty-two feminist groups in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, as well as from the public Facebook and Instagram pages of Lebanese and Syrian political activists.
A longitudinal, "screen-based" observation (Androutsopoulos 2017) of data published between 2011 and 2021 allowed us to "purposefully sample" (Patton 2002) texts grounded in historical events with regional and global repercussions, such as the Arab Spring, the MeToo movement, as well as the 2019 wave of protests in the Arab Levant. We analyzed these visual texts through Kress and van Leeuween's (2006) "visual grammar", as well as through the sociolinguistic notion of diglossia and hybridity in Arabic (ANONYMIZED; Brustad 2017).
The analysis reveals that activists contribute to the creation, proliferation and distribution of a shared multimodal repertoire, comprising strategies of self- and other-presentation like iconization and stylization, and a vast selection of media and genres including pop art, photos of street protests and protest signs. This creative and transgressive repertoire, situated in the sociopolitical post-Arab Spring context, as well as in the digital media infrastructure (ANONYMIZED), functions as a semiotic cue through which activists engage with historically multi-layered discourses, thereby engendering a dialogue surrounding their social and political struggle on a local and global scale.
The digital circulation of these multimodal strategies across different protest groups and movements in the Arab Levant arguably offers new perspectives on digital protest and social change. Contributing to the emerging literature on digital activism as embedded within the polarizing hegemonic neoliberal discourse, this study introduces digital mirroring as an emerging counter-hegemonic strategy of activism and resistance. Embedded in a historically dense context of colonization and post-colonization, and characterized by a kaleidoscope of creativity and memetics, Arab digital discourses of emancipation constitute a collective, intersectional, and argumentative effort.
References
Androutsopoulos, J. (2017). "Online Data Collection". In Data collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and applications, edited by Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs and Gerard Van Herk, 233-244. New York: Routledge.
Brustad, K. (2017). Diglossia as ideology. In The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World edited by Gunvor Mejdell and Jacob Høigilt. Leiden: Brill.
KhosraviNik, M., & E. Esposito (2018). Online hate, digital discourse and critique: Exploring digitally-mediated discursive practices of gender-based hostility. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 14(1), 45-68.
Patton, M.Q. (2002). Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
