bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
New Media and Social‐political Change in Iran
Authors: Sohrabi-Haghighat Mohammad Hadi 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThe increasing penetration of new communication technologies into everyday life has attracted a growing interest in the social, economic and political implications of these technologies. Most studies have looked at Western democratic societies and the literature on the developing countries is unfortunately small in comparison. In 2009 Iran witnessed a political upheaval in the aftermath of the presidential election in which the Internet was utilized effectively by the political opposition. News and videos of police brutality and repression were uploaded online, including onto social networking sites, in what was called the ‘Twitter Revolution’. Expectations rose on the capacity of new media to bring about democratic change in Iran. Later developments, however, showed that ‘mouse clicks’ alone do not produce profound political changes. In this article we look at the role of the new media and the social and political functions it took on in the post election period. We suggest that, firstly, new media has helped ordinary citizens and the political opposition challenge the government's monopoly of information. Secondly, we suggest that new media have paved the way for the emergence of a global public sphere for Iranians across the globe. This article also looks at the social and cultural impacts of the satellite channels which have been an ongoing source of concern for the Iranian conservative regime. Finally we take a critical stance and analyze the effects of new communication technologies in light of the ‘digital divide’ and ‘the radicalization of the Green Movement’.
Affinities of Dissent: Cyberspace, Performative Networks and the Iranian Green Movement
Authors: Rahimi Babak 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThis paper argues that the role of Internet activism in the Green Movement, a social protest movement that emerged after the contested 2009 presidential elections in Iran, lies in the creative configuration of complex networks that primarily interact through meaning-laden performances that carve out spaces of dissent. For social movements, especially under authoritarian rule like the Green Movement, cyberspace presents a kind of social space wherein imaginaries of self and other, resistance and power shape bonds of interactivity. Such bonds are described here as “social affinities” that are about contentious performances, actions that display intense emotions and narratives of protestation against power. Accordingly, the notion of “performative networks” underlines how the Iranian Green Movement, especially since the state repression that followed the elections, has compromised an interactive network organized around dramatic discourses and practices of contestation. In terms of structure, the paper is divided into three sections. (1) The first section shows how an electoral campaign was put together through loosely networked associations that (partly) operated through computer-mediated-communication that facilitated logistical resources for the actors. In the pre-election period, Internet played a prominent role in promoting and mobilizing a decentralized movement through offline and online shifting network connections, a phase of cyberactivism that is identified here as self-promoting networks. (2) The second section looks at what followed after the election results were announced, after which the regime unleashed its security forces to crackdown on the street protests. Cyberspace emerged as a set of other-offensive performative actions, contentious strategies like organization of street-demonstrations, hackactivism and website defacements that identified a more belligerent and aggressive strategy aimed at directly challenging state power, both offline and online. (3) The third and final phase compromises self-maintaining performative actions that largely revolves around memorial and mythical narratives for the maintenance of social affinities in light of state crackdowns in both physical and cyberspaces. The paper finally argues that Internet activism in the context of social movements involves dramatic performances of affective nature that form network associations and vibrant informal public spheres.
Speaking of Invasion: Narratives over Arabs in Eksi Sozluk, a Virtual Community in Turkey
Authors: Oguz Zeynep 
Published: February 2021

AbstractSince the day it was founded, Eksi Sozluk (sour dictionary) has been one of the most popular virtual communities in Turkey, fostering cultural and political discussions and acting as a public sphere. This paper examines contested narratives of hostility and hospitality over Arabs in Eksi Sozluk in order to trace the making of subjectivities in Turkey. I illustrate the ways Arab tourists are orientalized through the narratives of Eksi Sozluk authors who mark Arabs as dirty, disgusting, uncivilized, and backward. Next, I show contrary narratives that claim to welcome and embrace Arab tourists in Istanbul. I argue that a supposedly welcoming discourse towards Arabs also functions under the same ontological presuppositions of Orientalist fantasy. Finally, based on the conceptual framework of “Occidentalist fantasy,” I argue that the othering of Arabs in contemporary Turkey functions to create the illusion of a unified, sovereign subjectivity under the imagined Western gaze.
Political Activism 2.0: Comparing the Role of Social Media in Egypt's “Facebook Revolution” and Iran's “Twitter Uprising”
Authors: El-Nawawy Mohammed , Khamis Sahar 
Published: February 2021

AbstractSocial media, particularly blogging, Facebook and Twitter, have played a key role in instigating, accelerating and even organizing some of the uprisings and revolutions that have been taking place all over the Middle East. This role has been effective in galvanizing the youth and empowering them in their fights against repressive regimes and their plight for more freedom and independence. This study looks into the social media role in the so-called “Facebook revolution,” which took place in Egypt in January 2011 and the so-called “Twitter uprising,” which took place in Iran in June 2009. The Egyptian revolution did succeed in toppling the regime, while the Iranian uprising failed. Why did the calls for political change that started in the virtual world lead to actual change in the real world in Egypt but not in Iran? This study addresses this question by providing a critical analysis of the available literature and interviews with online activists in Egypt and Iran. The authors used the SPIN model (Segmentation, polycentrism, integration and networking) as a theoretical framework and concluded that the model helped social media succeed in Egypt, but not in Iran.
Egyptian uprising: Redefining Egyptian political community and reclaiming the public space
Authors: Youssef Mervat , Kumar Anup 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to understand and explain the emergence of a public sphere and the articulation of a new Egyptian identity. We argue that the Egyptian revolution, catalyzed by the social media, was possible because the young men and women succeeded in reclaiming the public space from the apparatuses of the post-colonial state. There was a contest between the protesters and the regime over the meaning of Egyptian identity and what it means to be an Egyptian. The protesters were able to redefine the Egyptian public sphere and redraw its contour. Through a semiotic and discourse analysis of the repertoires of protest, the symbols, the slogans and the images at Tahrir Square and on social media sites, we hope to show how the youth-led massive social mobilization redefined and reconstructed the civil society and the Egyptian national political community (identity).
The Earth Is Your Mosque (and Everyone Else's Too): Online Muslim Environmentalism and Interfaith Collaboration in UK and Singapore
Authors: Irving Lisa Siobhan 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThe environmentalist group Wisdom in Nature (WIN) and the online network Project ME: Muslims and the Environment have been chosen for analysis, from the UK and Singapore respectively, to illustrate examples of Muslim environmentalists who use the Internet, as a complement to community-based activism, to raise awareness of environmental concerns among both Muslims and non-Muslims. I will explore how WIN and Project ME seek to promote an interpretation of Islamic practice that is both environmentally responsible and open to close collaboration with non-Muslims as a consequence of being holistically protective of all in existence, both human and otherwise. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate how the Internet is used to facilitate the introduction of interested Muslims and non-Muslims into practical, off-line environmentalism, seen as an emotional community (Hetherington 1998), by minimizing the differences in culture, communication styles or religious belief that could otherwise pose difficulties.
Telling the Truth about Islam? Apostasy Narratives and Representations of Islam on WikiIslam.net
Authors: Enstedt Daniel , Larsson Göran 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThis article analyses six apostasy narratives published on WikiIslam.net and examines how Islam is represented and understood in them. The narratives contain self-referential and autobiographical components, and the truth-claims made in them are often based on the narrator's own experiences as a former Muslim. From the six testimonies it is clear that Islam is presented in a negative and biased way, as summed up in the following three points: (1) Islam is an irrational, illogical way of thought; the beliefs that Islam holds to be true are false; (2) Islam is not about peace, high standards and God; Islam is an evil, selfcentered and morally corrupt religion, and Muslims are hypocrites; (3) Islam is an oppressive, misogynist and violent religion, and is negative for its followers, especially women. These views on Islam, expressed in the apostasy narratives, articulate several themes found in islamophobic discourses and the so called New Atheist movement.
“I Am Malcolm X” – Islamic Themes in Hip‐hop Video Clips Online
Authors: Ackfeldt Anders 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThe Internet provides a space for new interpretations and conversations concerning religious practices to take place without the direct interference of religious authorities. The intention of this article is to highlight one vivid aspect of this development, Islamic themed hip-hop video clips distributed online. The visual aesthetics, the selection of pictures (or no pictures), themes and storylines supplementing the musical message can be used to mobilize and promote different traditions of interpretation of Islam. They can also convey interesting insights in the negotiations and compromises of Muslim identities in the consumer culture logic of the modern society. Lastly, they can provide a route to analyze the articulations of alternative interpretations of Islam often, but not always, rooted in a deep social-justice activism that connects marginalized communities within and beyond the Middle East
Global Story
Authors: LeVine Mark 
Published: February 2021

AbstractHiphop has long been described as a quintessentially globalized music. Similarly, it has been understood as a unique window into the lives’, fears and dreams of young people across the Arab and larger Muslim worlds for most of the post-September 11 era. Since young Tunisians revolted against long time dictator Zine El Abidin Ben Ali to the music of El General (or so the story goes), the music has been considered equally central to understanding the dynamics underlying the revolutionary upheavals that have shaken the Arab world during the last three years. This article reviews the history of hiphop across the region and attempts to provide a theoretical grounding for the role of artistic production in the revolutions using the work of Frankfurt School theoreticians Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin on the production, circulation and consumption of culture.
Gendering the February 20th Movement: Moroccan Women Redefining: Boundaries, Identities and Resistances
Authors: Abadi Houda 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThe Arab Spring opened up social and political spaces for women to make demands for gender quality, political and social reform, human rights, and equality. It has produced, changed and reinvigorated contestations around space, citizenship, femininity, religion, and sense of belonging, as women played an increasingly significant role in the revolutionary processes and developments in the region. This article will analyze the online and offline communication strategies that the February 20th Movement employed to answer the following three questions: a) What is the nature of gendered based demands and how are they articulated in February 20th movement?; b) How did the movement's activists discursively construct the gendered subjects and what are the material effects of the discourse; and lastly, c) What forms of expression, tools, and channels were used by Moroccan women activists to ensure the inclusion of gender-related issues and demands in political movement? To answer these questions, this qualitative study will take into account the prevailing political, social and economic contexts of Morocco, in an attempt to interpret Moroccan women activists’ experiences, demands, opportunities and constraints and how they contribute to redefining these women's identities, subjectivities and resistances differently. It uses textual and visual analysis of mediated communication materials obtained from the February 20th movement digital campaign videos and website to document not only women's representation within the February 20th movement but also explores the various ways subjects are materially and discursively constituted and circumscribed.
Reflections on Oral History: Four Cities on the Social History of Telephone Technology in Turkey
Authors: Çelik Burçe , Tarbuck Derya Gurses 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThroughout the history of the Turkish Republic, the telephone has collectively been perceived as a technology of modernity, progress, wealth and cultural capital. Yet due to a deteriorated infrastructure, which has hindered penetration of the telephone to the entire country, only a small segment of society was able to install a telephone in their private dwellings as well as in their place of business. This article discusses the results of an oral history research, based on in-depth interviews with telephone users (and non-users) in Istanbul, Ankara, Kayseri and Diyarbakir, conducted during 2011–2012. Essentially, this article argues, that technology transfer does not necessarily translate itself into modes of social life as modernity, at least not uniformly so. On the contrary, our oral history study displays a variety of “modernities”, which existed side by side.
Visual Representation, Propaganda and Cyberspace: The Case of the Palestinian Islamist Movements
Authors: Kovacs Attila 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThe article analyzes the changing position of the visual representation in the context of Islam from the starting point set up in the Qur'an and more specifically in the prophetic tradition to the theoretical positions of Islamic reformism and radicalism and the practice of Islamism movements. To understand this changing relationship is crucial for the research of ideology and propaganda of the contemporary Islamist movement. In the second part, the article illustrates this new position of images in the visual representations of Palestinian Islamist movements, specifically of Hamas — The Islamic Resistance Movement and its military wing the Brigades of the Martyr ‘Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine and its military wing the Phalanges of Jerusalem and finally the Popular Resistance Committees and its military wing the Victorious Salah al-Din Brigades.
Presenting the Glossy Look of Warfare in Cyberspace – The Islamic State's Magazine Dabiq
Authors: Günther Christoph 
Published: February 2021

AbstractSince Ramadān 1435 (June/July 2014), the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (dawlat al-islāmiyya, IS), the ‘State of the Caliphate’ (dawlat al-khilāfa), publishes a periodic magazine entitled Dabiq. This glossy outlet, produced and distributed by al-Hayāt, one of the movement's media organizations, is widely disseminated on the Internet and forms part of IS's advancement in the field of the media. Published in English and other European languages, it allows the movement to spread its messages to an international audience. This article analyzes and evaluates four issues of Dabiq published in English between June and October 2014.It argues that three aspects are crucial for framing the ideological justification of the movement's warfare and help to rally support for their state-building project: the development and establishment of images of the enemy, the notion of ‘strangeness,’ and the call for emigration. Within this framework, the magazine intertwines textual and visual accounts of the movement's physical and virtual battlefields and mediates these to a non-Arab speaking public. Thus, Dabiq is – chronologically, technologically, and ideologically – the most recent and very well elaborated attempt of the Islamic State at winning support among the broadest public possible on a global level. The article concludes that the magazine at large and the abovementioned aspects reflect both the ideological structure of the movement and its current situation in Iraq and Syria. Utilizing derogative images of their enemies helps the Islamic State both to maintain its claim for legitimacy and to position their adherents and opponents within a dichotomous ideological framework. On this basis, it calls its followers to immigrate to the land of the two rivers and the Levant in order to support the establishment of an Islamic State and eradicate nation state borders.
Online Social Research in Iran: A Need to Offer a Bigger Picture
Authors: Honari Ali 
Published: February 2021

AbstractGiven the limits of in-country and survey research in closed societies, the World Wide Web - in particular online forums - offers an alternative field for observing and understanding these societies and their development. However, the praise given to the Internet's role in bringing about political change in Arab uprisings and the 2009 elections post protests has resulted in a tendency in the existing literature to focus on very narrow political discussions and behaviors on partisan online forums. Consequently, various areas of interest to Iranian users have been neglected or ignored. The aim of this review is to identify the major online spheres of the Iranian web, the most important online forums in each sphere, the issues being discussed, and the characteristics of the users of each sphere and forum. By doing so it recognizes the theoretical and methodological drawbacks of existing online research on the Iranian Web. This review concludes with some suggestions for further online social research in Iran.
2011 Tahrir Square Demonstrations in Egypt: Semantic Structures That Unify And Divide
Authors: Khatib Hakim 
Published: February 2021

AbstractWhile literature has focused on political, economic and social indicators to understand the shifts, or rather the fragmentationsof the political scene in Egypt, the role of semiotic constructions was significantly if not totally neglected. This article investigates whether the demands and messages produced by protesters of Tahrir Square in January 2011 have played a role in processes of unification and fragmentation of Egyptians. Following Roland Barthes’ (2006) and Chris Barker's (2011) methods of linkage to define the meanings suggested by the commentaries that appeared on the banners during the demonstrations of 2011 in Egypt, this article argues that the demands, messages and meanings produced and suggested throughout the demonstrations of 2011 in Egypt have not been responded to accordingly; therefore they have created a complicated transformational process that is replete with polarization. The messages, which brought people to collectively act against authoritarianism, are the same messages that have outflanked them. An Egyptian profound debate to define the signified meanings at Tahrir Square has not occurred in Egypt leaving a tremendous space for interpretations and conflicting perceptions.
Youth Activism and Social Networks in Egypt
Authors: Tohamy Ahmed 
Published: February 2021

AbstractThe arrival of the Internet-based technologies has made the work of professional activists much more effective and has attracted the attention of society and observers, if only because their internal and external communications became much cheaper and harder to be monitored. The new social networking technologies have provided the youth with new channels for participation and empowerment. This became true in a part of the world where the older generations, in either government or opposition, controlled the traditional political and cultural arena and dominated the public sphere. However, the younger generations gradually launched creative initiatives using online media in recent years. The younger generations have engaged in public affairs by peaceful means to bring about a change and to influence the decision-making processes and policies. In this regard, the new social media played a facilitating role in the long wave of continuous politics in Egypt, although it is not a causal role. It basically helped in the mobilization and framing process aiming to delegitimize the regime and demoralize its policies. The ideas and ideologies spread in the public sphere, and, in addition to grievances, enabled the young activists to present new claims and to behave in ways that fundamentally challenged the authorities. Indeed the social media impact could not lead to real change without physical offline action in society. In this respect the most notable actions, such as the April 6 Strike in El Mahala 2008 and January 25 revolution, were triggered by the marriage between online and offline activism, particularly when activists moved smartly between online and offline activities to create real challenges to the regime and to escape from police repression.
Behind the Screen: the Syrian Virtual Resistance
Authors: Brownlee Billie Jeanne 
Published: February 2021

AbstractSix years have gone by since the political upheaval that swept through many Middle East and North African (MENA) countries begun. Syria was caught in the grip of this revolutionary moment, one that drove the country from a peaceful popular mobilisation to a deadly fratricide civil war with no apparent way out. This paper provides an alternative approach to the study of the root causes of the Syrian uprising by examining the impact that the development of new media had in reconstructing forms of collective action and social mobilisation in pre-revolutionary Syria. By providing evidence of a number of significant initiatives, campaigns and acts of contentious politics that occurred between 2000 and 2011, this paper shows how, prior to 2011, scholarly work on Syria has not given sufficient theoretical and empirical consideration to the development of expressions of dissent and resilience of its cyberspace and to the informal and hybrid civic engagement they produced.