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Kelly Lewis Thesis DIGITALLY MEDIATED MARTYRDOM: THE VISUAL POLITICS OF POSTHUMOUS IMAGES IN THE POPULAR STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE Kelly Lewis MSc, PostGradDipJourn, BA Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Digital Media Research Centre Creative industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology 2020 Keywords Digitally mediated martyrdom Death Martyrdom Injustice Digital image Posthumous image Visual social media Activism Social justice movements Political protest Injustice symbols Operative image Khaled Said Trayvon Martin Instagram Discursive practice Memetic culture Digital affordances Visual politics Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice i Abstract This thesis investigates an emerging dynamic within contemporary activist cultures: the production, editing, sharing, and further transformation of digital images in response to the deaths of innocent civilians due to police brutality and to political injustice. I call this “digitally mediated martyrdom”, understood as a ritualised communicative process that emerges in and through digital images to give visibility to the unjust killing of ordinary individuals, and establishes as its targets of protest systems of authority, abuse, and human rights violations. Digitally mediated martyrdom involves the visually oriented and discursive practices of activists and ordinary people who participate in symbolically resurrecting victims and transforming them into martyrs in the popular struggle for social justice. Digital media affordances enables the production and circulation of new types of images that can make violent injustice visible in new ways. This thesis develops new theoretical frameworks and analytical concepts to study the increasingly complex role that digitally mediated images play in transnational activism and globalised politics. Specifically, it develops a new conception of digitally mediated martyrdom as a contemporary political practice within transnational activist cultures and popular social justice movements. The framework is 1) developed through a preliminary example of #WeAreAllKhaledSaid, where I investigated how, following the brutal death of Khaled Said in 2010 at the hands of Egyptian security forces, the circulation of posthumous images of Said (both in life and post-mortem) were deployed during and were instrumental to the 2010- 2011 Egyptian uprisings; and 2) then applied to the more elaborate case study of #JusticeForTrayvonMartin, where I investigated how posthumously circulated images of Trayvon Martin were deployed in the contemporary struggle for Black social justice in America and in the Black Lives Matter movement between 2012-2019. Previous digital activism research has overwhelmingly tended to address activist practice through the prism of verbal/written textual analysis, whether through close reading or ‘big data’ analyses. The focus of this study was centred more on visual than verbal communication: it addressed the growing role and complexity of digitally mediated images that were deployed in emerging configurations of social contestation, ii Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice political resistance, and transnational activism. To do so, I traced the chronology of protest images and their circulation, appropriations and digital variations on Facebook, Twitter, and mainstream news media platforms (for Khaled Said), and on Instagram (for Trayvon Martin). I examined how images were discursively deployed to perform different communicative functions at different times and in relation to different events. The study found that the posthumously circulated images of Khaled Said and Trayvon Martin were recurrently used for commemorative purposes to mobilise political dissent in ways that reflected new developments in the deployment of martyr images and the narrative of martyrdom. This occurred through complex communicative practices of appropriation and reappropriation, mediation, and remediation, which manifested around central claims of injustice, human rights abuses, and collective identification. The cultural meaning and symbolic representation of the figure of the martyr have evolved throughout history and beyond traditional religious or nationalist causes. This thesis argues that the narrative of martyrdom has re-emerged in the past decade as a distinct political aesthetic of popular protest, and that the phenomenon is made manifest as a discursive practice that is present within global cultures of digital activism. The study demonstrated that digital remix culture enabled for the development of new visual practices through which the martyr narrative was developed and made politically productive as a discourse of resistance. This significantly contributed to bringing into being multivocal discourses that reflected different articulations of lived experiences, public contestations, and collective discontent. The study found that the figure of the martyr is increasingly being deployed to represent the popular struggle for social justice, to radically reimagine alternative futures, and to rearticulate and redress systems of injustice. Digitally mediated martyrdom, then, operates as a both an explicit and subversive vehicle through which activists and ordinary people are able to give visibility to flagrant human rights abuses and to perceived situations of political injustice. The affordances of digitally media technologies permit for the mediation of visibility of injustices that are often censored by oppressive regimes or overlooked in mainstream media coverage, including police brutality and racist violence. The study concluded that digital media affordances are critical to the emergence of digitally mediated martyrdom as a new transnational protest dynamic, in that they shape the possibilities of martyrdom as a digitally Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice iii mediated and ritualised performance of political mobilisation. The phenomenon of digitally mediated martyrdom offers valuable insights into how power and meaning is enacted in and through digitally mediated images. iv Digitally Mediated Martyrdom: The Visual Politics of Posthumous Images in the Popular Struggle for Social Justice Table of Contents Keywords ................................................................................................................................... i Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... v List of Figures ......................................................................................................................... vii List of Tables ........................................................................................................................... ix Previously Published Content ................................................................................................... x Statement of Original Authorship ............................................................................................ xi Acknowledgements................................................................................................................. xii Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................... 1 1.1 Overview ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Scope and Context .......................................................................................................... 7 1.3 Research Approach......................................................................................................... 9 1.4 Research Design and Methods ..................................................................................... 12 1.5 Thesis Outline............................................................................................................... 25 Chapter 2: Digitally Mediated Martyrdom ..................................................... 31 2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 31 2.2 Digitally Mediated Martyrdom Defined....................................................................... 33 2.3 Conceptual Framework ................................................................................................ 41 2.4 Martyrdom and Mediation............................................................................................ 46 2.5 Digital Mediation ......................................................................................................... 51 2.6 Exploratory Example #WeAreAllKhaledSaid ............................................................. 74 Warning: Graphic images contained in this section ............................................................... 74 2.7 Methods and Data Collection ....................................................................................... 76 2.8 Data Analysis ............................................................................................................... 77 2.9 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................
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