The 2009 Iranian Presidential Election Protests
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Networked Identifications: Constructing Identities and Ideologies in the 2009 Iranian Election Protests Christopher M. Featherman A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Sandra Silberstein, Chair Gail Stygall Suhanthie Motha Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English © Copyright 2013 Christopher M. Featherman ii University of Washington Abstract Networked Identifications: Constructing Identities and Ideologies in the 2009 Iranian Election Protests Christopher M. Featherman Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Sandra Silberstein Department of English This dissertation explores the strategic formation of counter-hegemonic discourses during social movements and their rescaling through mobile social media across networked, translocal public spheres. Through an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical discourse analysis, communication studies, and social movement theory, this qualitative research focuses on the discursive constructions of identities and ideologies during the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests. Examining activists’ discursive tactics in a corpus of Twitter tweets, Flickr photo uploads, and YouTube videos and comparing them with the interdiscursive strategies of U.S. legacy news media texts, I argue that Iranian activists’ use of social media and English add to the micronarratives of vernacular globalization while also calling into question Western master narratives about Iran. I also argue that activists’ reflexive discursive practices and symbolic reentextualizations help form transnational sociomental bonds that strengthen collective actors’ sense of solidarity, though at the risk of informationalizing their borrowed iii discourses and constraining their political stance-taking to the level of affect. While the use of new media in recent social movements has attracted scholarly attention in various fields, much of it has been in quantitative and network-mapping studies. This project seeks, therefore, to address the relative lack of qualitative, microlevel perspectives on new media discursive practices in social movements while also engaging arguments on the discursive relationships between cyber-rhetoric and democracy promotion as well as present understandings of how new media discourses shape globalized vernaculars of English. iv For Marija and Lukas, always v Acknowledgments I would like to thank the University of Washington Department of English for their financial support in the form of a teaching assistantship, without which I would not have been able to pursue my doctoral degree. In addition, I am grateful to Professor Anis Bawarshi, who, as Director of the Expository Writing Program, supported my teaching with counsel and insight. I would also like to thank the Department, as well as the Graduate School, for the travel awards that allowed me to attend the various conferences where I presented my academic research, including the pilot study for this dissertation. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Professor Gail Stygall, for her inspiring courses on language and rhetoric and for introducing me to the world of discourse analysis; Assistant Professor Suhanthie Motha, for steering me through the diverse approaches to global English; and my committee chair, Professor Sandra Silberstein, for her unwavering support, guidance, and patience throughout my graduate studies. vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................vi List of Figures ..................................................................................................................ix Chapter One Opening: Protesting the Results ...........................................................1 Theoretical Contexts ........................................................................................................6 Literature Review ..............................................................................................................8 Addressing the Research Gap .......................................................................................13 Project Overview ............................................................................................................17 Déjà Vu All Over Again: Conclusions .............................................................................21 Chapter Two “Down with Potatoes!”: Theory, Methods, Contexts .........................28 Shouting from the Rooftops: The 2009 Iranian Presidential Election Protests ..............29 The Seeds of Protest: The Khatami Reforms, the Rise of ICTs, and the Iranian Youth Population .......................................................................................................................37 Communication Power: A Theoretical Research Framework .........................................44 Critical Discourse Analysis: A Contested Research Approach .......................................56 Counterpower and Coercion, Winners and Losers: Conclusions ...................................68 Chapter Three Discursively Constructing the Protesters’ Identities in U.S. Legacy Media .............................................................................................................................71 A Contentious Couple: An Overview of Recent U.S.-Iranian Relations ..........................73 Discourse in Mental Spaces: Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks for Analyzing Ideology in Media Discourse ..........................................................................................80 A Fluid Continuum of Ideologies: U.S. Legacy Media Analysis ......................................93 Plural Interpretations of Modernity: Conclusions ..........................................................125 vii Chapter Four Borrowed Language: Reentextualizing Symbolic Resources and Discursively Constructing Stance ............................................................................129 A Quest for Sovereignty and Modernity: Sociocultural and Historical Contexts ...........132 Reticulate Spaces and the Logics of Participation: Theory and Methods ....................138 Circulation Is the Content: Analysis ..............................................................................149 Borrowing as a Tactical Strategy: Conclusions .............................................................172 Chapter Five Networked Identifications: Effervescence or Resonance? .............176 Mobilities, Co-Presence, and Delocalization: Theoretical Considerations of Identity. ..179 Collective Identifications and Deictic Shifts: Analysis ...................................................182 Effervescence or Resonance?: Closings ......................................................................204 References ...................................................................................................................214 Appendix A Selected Articles from U.S. Legacy Media Research Corpus ...................238 Appendix B Twitter Data ...............................................................................................281 Appendix C “Where Is This Place” Transcript ...............................................................296 viii List of Figures Figure 1.1 Tweet from 2009 Iranian presidential election protests ..............................2 Figure 1.2 Iranian activist’s tweet from 2009 protests .................................................2 Figure 1.3 President Obama’s 2008 victory tweet .......................................................4 Figure 1.4 Photo of 2009 protests in Tehran shared in Flickr .....................................5 Figure 1.5 Cellphone video capture uploaded to YouTube .........................................6 Figure 1.6 Iranian protesters in Tehran, 1979 ............................................................21 Figure 1.7 Green movement rally, Tehran, 2009 .......................................................24 Figure 3.1 Election corpus KWIC results for pragmatic .............................................97 Figure 3.2 BYU COCA KWIC results for Obama collocated with pragmatic n±4 .......97 Figure 3.3 Political metaphors with linked and related terms from U.S. legacy news media corpus .................................................................................101 Figure 3.4 Research corpus evidence of discursive links between Mousavi and social media/technology ..........................................................................104 Figure 3.5 Networked constructions of Mousavi in U.S. legacy media during the 2009 Iranian presidential election ...........................................................109 Figure 3.6 Examples of agentive identity constructions in the research corpus .......110 Figure 3.7 Concordances of sea in the research corpus ..........................................112 Figure 3.8 Examples of the phrase sea of people in the BYU COCA .......................113 Figure 3.9 Examples of CROWD AS FLUID metaphors in the research corpus .....113 Figure 3.10 Constructions of the protesters as networked with technology and the West……………………………………………………………………... .119 Figure 3.11 Sample concordance of Twitter in the research corpus .........................121 ix Figure 3.12 Networked