IDENTITY, GENDER, AND (IM)POLITENESS: A CASE OF TWITTER INTERACTIONS ON WOMEN DRIVING IN SAUDI ARABIA

The traditional view in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is the separation of men and women. Women in the KSA were not allowed to drive cars. On the 26th of September 2017, the King of Saudi Arabia lifted the ban on women driving. This was a major change and a symbolic step for women as part of their quest to achieve visibility and social equality. This became a controversial topic that resulted in many discussions on social media platforms, one of them being Twitter. While existing research has examined (1) CMC, (2) Gendered Identities and (3) Saudi Culture, there is no research, to the best of my knowledge, that brings these areas together in a Saudi context. Specifically, through combining linguistic texts and multimodality features. The study examined identity construction on Twitter to determine how idealized identities were claimed, assigned, and negotiated in the context of culture with conservative views on gender roles and practices, and the strategies used by males and females to reposition and empower themselves in digital environments. This study focused on one case of a Twitter interaction of a Saudi male who posted a selfie showing his wife while teaching her how to drive. The Twitter post received many responses, some of which were negative. Tweets were qualitatively analyzed by using a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Interpersonal Pragmatic approaches. In the Twitter interactions, online users implicitly and/or explicitly claimed, assigned, challenged and/or negotiated different idealized identities to the original poster (OP), themselves and/or other users. These idealized identities are the ones that predominantly figure in the KSA culture: 1) the Ideal Muslim; 2) the Ideal Saudi National; 3) the Ideal Saudi Member of Society (Citizen). Idealized identities are markers of Saudi identity and people position themselves in interactions through discursive negotiations of identity construction. However, there were instances when users positioned themselves during an interaction, but they did not wish to engage in discursive negotiations and just declared their opinions. The strategies people used in online interactions to empower and/or reposition themselves and their viewpoints were through acts of (im)politeness via words and images

Gendered discourses and discursive strategies employed in Twitter-hashtagged debates about Saudi-women’s issues

This study is motivated by Twitter’s growing popularity as a space where Saudi men and women discuss issues pertaining to their lives without being stigmatised in an otherwise gender-segregated society. It aims to shed light on the multiple perspectives adopted by them to reveal an existing tension between tradition and modernity in SA (Yamani, 2000). Adopting an eclectic qualitative method, I draw from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) tools to analyse the constellation of discourses that are related to gender and the discursive strategies used as resources for stance taking in a corpus of 1000 unique text-based tweets derived from two selected topical hashtags collected in June, 2015. These two hashtags mark the public reaction to a) newly-announced travel controls for Saudi women and b) statistics about the percentages of unmarried Saudi women. in. The data provides evidence that voices of difference, protest, and dissent regarding women’s rights and their social role are in a dialogic relation with dominant conservative discourses. The analysis reveals that hashtag contributors mainly engage in the evaluation of gendered discourses, epitomised by a predominant Discourse of Patriarchy, and a Discourse of Gender Equality and Human Rights. A Discourse of Patriarchy manifests in two mutually-supporting discourses: a discourse of dominance that privileges men and gives them control over women, and a discourse about the subordination of women. The Discourse of Gender Equality discusses women’s retrieval of their full citizenship status, without the need for guardianship, and an equal social respect for their life choices, including those related to marriage and mobility. While drawing on these discourses, contributors position themselves on a spectrum of conservative (anti-change) and progressive (pro-change) stances. By way of critiquing them, and sometimes, constructing new democratic social worldviews, the contributors show signs of engaging in a form of linguistic intervention to promote social change. Invocations of these discourses were manipulated for the macro-functions of perpetuating, undermining, or transforming existing discriminatory practices against women. Within these macro-strategies, other meso-discursive strategies were employed, namely referential and predicational strategies, assimilation and differentiation, legitimation and delegitimation, intensification and mitigation, and humour. These meso-strategies were fulfilled drawing on linguistic and semantic means including sarcasm, laughter, mock suggestions, comparison, metaphors, etc. I argue that the identified patterns found in the Twitter data reflect as well as facilitate (on the discursive level) an ongoing gradual social change in the Saudi society since the unheard can now be heard and the dominant social practices involving women are being presented for public deliberation. In addition to contributing to the Arabic literature on discourse and gender, this study engages in an act of historicising these changes in SA and provides an assessment of the transformative potential of Twitter

User experiences of online community support for mental ill health

This doctoral study explores the use of online user-led community support forums for people with diagnosed and self-diagnosed mental ill health. The study is a qualitative analysis of three online forums and four semi-structured interviews incorporating twenty-nine participants. There is a lack of research into online communities using multiple methods, and my study uses two methods, virtual ethnography and semi-structured interviews, to ensure that there is a breadth and diversity to the research, allowing participants to choose different ways to participate. The thesis is framed within the context of austerity measures in the United Kingdom, and cuts in funding for many aspects of mental health social care. Negative attitudes to mental health issues by members of society and policymakers can lead to an increase in people isolated through lack of formal service support. The study explores the use of a particular form of support, online community support forums, an area that is currently experiencing a growth in research. My original contribution to knowledge is that peer-to-peer online communities enable people to construct their own mental health narrative by combining the lived experience of others with their own experience. By doing so, people can escape the social labelling, the stigma, and recreate a sense of self out of, or detached from, the medical and social discourses. This study highlighted how online forums can restore sociality and how online communities help people to clarify their own mental health narrative. As such, online forums and communities contribute to and are a new aspect of the health pathway. This research therefore, helps to inform gaps in health pathways, so that more suitable, cost-effective online resources can be created to reduce the effects of mental illness and support those who are unable to find support elsewhere