#Stand with women in Afghanistan: Civic participation, symbolism, and morality in political activism on Twitter

Abstract

At the time of writing, it had become common to find trending social media hashtags where users were expressing their feelings about current social and political issues through a range of symbolic gestures, such as striking a pose, wearing a garment, or changing their personal icon. Scholars had begun to consider such gestures in regard to whether they constitute a meaningful form of civic participation or activism. In the present paper, we seek to contribute to this literature by using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine the contents of one Twitter hashtag where users participate in this form of activism: #StandWithWomenlnAfghanistan. Aligning with emerging scholarship on the nature of online affective publics, the analysis shows that those tweeting do not align with clear and specific issues, causalities, or solutions based on contextual understanding. On the one hand, symbolic gestures can be thought of as vernaculars that support a heterogeneous, fuzzy, and incoherent set of meanings. Yet on the other hand, across the posts using this hashtag, we find a discourse where injustice and solutions are based on notions of individual identity and freedom of expression rooted in the liberal democratic traditions of the European Enlightenment, here brought to bear on the hugely diverse and specific lives of women in Afghanistan. For many scholars, it is such ethnocentrism that underpins the very imperialist imagining of Afghanistan that led to, and legitimized, the invasion and occupation in the first place.