A Twitter network and discourse analysis of the Rana Plaza collapse

Abstract

Ten years after the collapse of the Rana Plaza textile factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh that killed over 1000 factory workers, the event has become a symbol for the desolate working conditions in fast fashion producer countries in the global south. We analyze the global Twitter discourse on this event over a three week window around the collapse date over the years 2013–2022 by a mixture of network-theoretic quantitative and discourse-theoretic qualitative methods. In particular, key communicators and the community structure of the discourse participants are identified using a multilayer network modeling approach and the interpretative patterns of the key communicator’s tweets of all years are analyzed using the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse. This combination of quantitative and qualitative methods reveals that the discourse is separated into three phases: reporting, reprocessing, and commemoration. These phases can be identified by the temporal evolution, network-structural properties, and the contentual analysis of the discourse. After the negotiation of the interpretative framework in the reprocessing phase, subsequent years are characterized by its commemorative repetition as well as resulting demands by different international actor groups despite highly fluctuating participants.