Victoria Balan- Technologies of hope – The discursive construction of the #WomanLifeFreedom movement in Time and Wired magazine
The rise of citizen-led movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #FridaysforFuture have cemented digital activism as a crucial feature of contemporary politics. At the same time, digital activism exists on a shifting discursive terrain, characterized by multiple coexisting definitions and partially overlapping categories. This study understands digital activism as an important object of discourse (Foucault, 1969) where ideals about democratic politics can be articulated and examined.
Following up on recent research (Balan & Dumitrica, 2022), this study analyses a sample of articles from Time (n=35) and Wired (n=10), zooming in on the #WomanLifeFreedom movement in Iran. The findings illustrate how news magazines articulate the political power of digital technologies at
different stages of activism, tracing its discursive construction from the movement inception to present day. In line with previous findings, the articulation of technologies as a ‘last resort’, ‘double-edged sword’, and ‘digital witness’ to the life of the Other remain central to the discussion of #WomanLifeFreedom protests in Wired and Time. New discourses of feminism, youth and global solidarity become relevant in this sample. The presentation will highlight how these discourses re(emerge) and intersect with one another at different moments of citizen mobilization. While the two news magazines are more critical of the political power of digital technologies in the #WomanLifeFreedom movement, paying more attention to potential risks and dangers (e.g., internet blackouts, surveillance, tracking), the overall discourse still reinforces techno-utopian imaginaries of digital technologies as democratizing forces, while minimizing the challenges related to sustaining mobilization and achieving political change.
Seyed Mohammadhos Mirhashemi- From space of resistance to public space: A new approach to 2022 Iran protests
Where the public space is under strict control of the government and is saturated with symbols of government dominance on the one hand and all protest activities are prohibited on the other hand, it can be expected that social media plays a decisive role in organizing protest actions; A clash between a group that has arranged its symbols throughout society and a group that has established its own symbols in a parallel world. This is what happened in the 2022 protests in Iran which became an arena for the unprecedented massive confrontation of protesters with symbols of dominant power in the public space.
A part of the society had practiced pulling down these symbols in this virtual space for years, and now this space of resistance becomes the source for their actions in the public space. They owned a space that they for a little while, and recording this action in the virtual space increases the hope of its repetition and continuation in the future. In this way, the cycle could repeat itself.
This research investigates this form of resistance and the ways of challenging the dominant symbols in social media and their overflow into the public space in the form of a set of theoretical innovations.
Azadeh Shamsi: Digital Feminist Activism and Imagining the Future- Case study of the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ protest in Iran
This research project investigates Iranian women’s collective imagination of the future by focusing on the experience of doing digital feminist activism during the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran. The death of Mahsa Jina Amini, a young Kurdish woman who was arrested and killed by the morality police on September 17, 2022, in Tehran for flouting dress laws, sparked a massive street protest in Iran, primarily led by women. Alongside massive street protests in large and small cities across the country, the largest Twitter movement in Iran’s history took place through the use of the #MahsaAmini hashtag. This research explores Iranian women’s digital activism both as a crucial component of the recent uprising and as part of the practice of feminism in women’s everyday lives, with a focus on the mediation of affect through connective technologies. The focus of this project is on how affective publics or counterpublics, enabled by the affordances of digital media, shape the affective political formation of Iranian women and their life experiences of inequality. Through digital narratives communicated by textual and visual narratives on social media platforms, a new collective future is imagined. Because of the complexity and multilayeredness of Iranian women’s media engagement, I use a range of methodological tools, integrating research methods to analyse the meanings of images, texts, and practices on social media in their multiple social and political contexts including participatory observation, Semi-structured interview, and qualitative text analysis.