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Article published In:
Networked Practices of Emotion and Stancetaking in Reactions to Mediatized Events and Crises
Edited by Korina Giaxoglou and Marjut Johansson
[Pragmatics 30:2] 2020
► pp. 277–302

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter

Story participation and stancetaking in visual small stories

ORCID logo | The Open University, UK
| Cardiff University

Despite an increased interest in the discourse representations of refugees in the media, little attention has been paid so far to the circulation and uptake of such portrayals in social media. This article addresses this gap by examining networked users’ reactions to the iconic image of Alan Kurdi, which quickly turned into a shared story. By analyzing story frames, i.e. orientations to the Storyrealm, the Taleworld, or the Outside world (De Fina 2016) in multimodal posts (dated September 3rd 2015), which feature the hashtag #JeSuisAylan, we show how hashtags, comments, and images combine into visual small stories (Georgakopoulou 2016) that prompt acts of affective and narrative stancetaking. Our analysis calls attention to stancetaking as embedded in storytelling activities and calls for extending the critical examination of discourse representations to the study of their uptake in practices of story participation online.

Keywords: refugee crisis, small stories, stancetaking, story frames, participation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Previous research on media representations of refugee
    • 1.2Approaches to frames
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Coding scheme and research questions
  • 3.Findings
    • 3.1Social media activity types
    • 3.2Story frames
    • 3.3Visual story frames
    • 3.4Acts of stancetaking
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 6 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18057.gia
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