SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF NGO’S INSTARGAM POSTS ON NATIONAL DAYS

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This article examines how NGOs representing social groups in Turkey symbolically construct national identity by describing national days on Instagram. National signs and symbols function to communicate national identity to its members and create a sense of belonging. Visual images also appear as traces of social, economic, and political processes in which identities are shaped. Therefore, this paper argues that analyzing Instagram posts by NGOs can provide insight into how national identity is constructed through national days. NGOs' organization fields are chosen considering the 2018 report of 'NGOs in the Development Process' by the Turkish Ministry of Development, and the 'maximum diversity sampling' method was used for analysis. A grounded coding process supported a thematic analysis approach was used to explore how NGOs portray national days. For this qualitative thematic analysis, a coding frame was used to conduct cluster analyses of the symbols using QDA Miner software to understand how they relate. The findings indicate that the celebration messages are mostly visualized through certain national symbols in social media. These differ in three main national identity discourses (Kemalist Nationalism, Right-Conservatism, Liberal-Kemalism and small segment of Islamist discourse and Turkism discourse shaped around nationalism, militarism and partly Islamism) parallel to NGO's political and ideological positions or social groups and values they represent.