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.
Adami, Elisabetta. 2014. “Retwitting, Reposting, Repining, Reshaping Identities Online: Towards a Social Semiotic Multimodal Analysis of Digital Remediation”. LEA – Lingue e Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente 31: 223–243.
Adami, Elisabetta, and Carey Jewitt. 2016. “Special Issue: Social media and the Visual”. Visual Communication 15 (3): 263–270.
Blommaert, Jan. 2015. “One Crisis, Three Photos: How Europe Started Caring for Refugees”. Alternative Democracy, Ctrl+Alt+Dem. Research on Alternative Democratic Life in Europe [online]. Available at: [URL]. Accessed: 29/09/2018.
Bouko, Catherine. (this issue). “Emotions through Texts and Images: A Multimodal Analysis of Reactions to the Brexit vote on Flickr”. Pragmatics (Special Issue: Networked Emotion and Stancetaking, ed. by Korina Giaxoglou and Marjut Johansson) X (x): xx–xx.
Caple, Helen. 2013. Photojournalism: A Semiotic Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Tijana Stolić. 2017. “Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee ‘Crisis’: a Visual Typology of European News”. Media, Culture and Society 39(8): 1162–1177.
Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Tijana Stolić. 2019. “Photojournalism as Political Encounter: Western News Photography in the 2015 Migration ‘Crisis’”. Visual Communication 18 (3): 311–331.
Chouliaraki, Lilie, Michael Orwicz, and Robin Greeley. 2019. “Special Issue: The Visual Politics of the Human”. Visual Communication 18 (3): 301–309.
Cooper, Samantha, Erin Olejniczak, and Caroline Lenette. 2016. “Media Coverage of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Regional Australia: A Critical Discourse Analysis”. Media International Australia, 16 (1): 78–89.
Coupland, Nikolas, and Virpi Ylanne. 2006. “Relational Frames in Weather Talk”. In The Discourse Reader, 2nd edition, ed. by Adam Jaworski and Nicolas Coupland, 349–362. Oxon: Routledge.
De Cock, Barbara, and Andrea Pizarro Pedraza. 2018. “From Expressing Solidarity to Mocking on Twitter: Pragmatic Functions of Hashtags Starting with #jesuis across Languages. Language in Society 47 (2): 197–217.
de Cock, Barbara, and Andrea Pzzaro Pedraza. (this issue). “Any #JesuisIraq planned? Claiming places of affect”. Pragmatics (Special Issue: Networked Emotion and Stancetaking, ed. by Korina Giaxoglou and Marjut Johansson) X (x): xx–xx.
De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2012. Analyzing Narrative. Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Fina, Anna. 2016. “Storytelling and Audience Reactions in Social Media”. Language in Society 451, 473–498.
De Groot, M. Jocelyn, and Alex P. Leith. 2015. “R.I.P. Kutner: Parasocial Grief”. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying 77 (3): 199–216.
Du Bois, John. 2007. “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse. Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. by Robert Englebertson, 139–182. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Economou, Dorothy. 2014. “Telling a Different Story: Stance in Verbal-Visual Displays in the News”. In Critical Multimodal Studies of Popular Discourse, ed. by Emilia Djonov and Sumin Zhao, 181–201. New York: Routledge.
Esses, Victoria, Stelian Medianu, and Andrea S. Lawson. 2013. “Uncertainty, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees”. Journal of Social Issues 69 (3): 518–536.
Fisher, Kimberly. 1997. “Locating Frames in the Discursive Universe”. Sociological Research Online 2 (3). Available at: [URL]. Accessed: 15/09/2018.
Gabrielatos, Costas, and Paul Baker. 2008. “Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press 1996–2005)”. Journal of English Linguistics 36 (1): 5–38.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2015a. “Small Stories Research. Methods-Analysis-Outreach”. In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, ed. by Anna De Fina, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 255–273 Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2015b. “Sharing as Rescripting. Place Manipulations on YouTube between Narrative and Social Media Affordances”. Discourse, Context, and Media 91: 64–72.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2016. “From Narrating the Self to Posting Self(ies): A Small Stories Approach to Selfies”. Open Linguistics 21: 300–317.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, and Korina Giaxoglou. 2018. Emplotment in the Social Mediatization of the Economy: The Poly-storying of Economist Yanis Varoufakis. Language@Internet 161: 1–51.
Georgiou, Myria, and Rafal, Zaborowski. 2017. “Media Coverage of the “Refugee Crisis”: A Cross- European Perspective”. Council of Europe Report (DG1 (2017) 03). Council of Europe.
Giaxoglou, Korina, and Tereza Spilioti. 2018. Mediatizing Death and Suffering: Rescripting Visual Stories of the Refugee Crisis as Distant Witnessing and Mourning. In Discours des Réseaux Sociaux: Enjeux Publics, Politiques et Médiatiques, ed. by Marcel Burger, Joanna Thornborrow, and Richard Fitzerald, 65–92. Belgium: De Boeck.
Giaxoglou, Korina. 2018. #JeSuisCharlie? Hashtags as Narrative Resources in Contexts of Ecstatic Sharing. Discourse, Context, and Media 221: 13–20.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goriunova, Olga. 2015. “Introduction”. In The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi, ed. by Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova, 1–5. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Available at: [URL]. Accessed: 18/09/2018.
Gualda, Estrella, and Carolina Rebollo. 2016. “The Refugee Crisis on Twitter: A Diversity of Discourses at a European Crossroads”. Journal of Spatial and Organizational Dynamics 6 (3): 199–212.
Hickerson, Andrea, and Kate Dunsmore. 2015. “Locating Refugees: A Media Analysis of Refugees in the United States in “World Refugee Day” Coverage”. Journalism Practice 10 (3): 424–438.
Hoijer, Birgitta. 2004. “The Discourse of Global Compassion: The Audience and Media Reporting of Human Suffering”. Media, Culture and Society 26 (4): 513–531.
Ibrahim, Yasmin. 2018. “The Unsacred and the Spectacularized”. Social Media + Society 4 (4): 1–9.
IOM. 2015. Global Migration Trends Factsheet. International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Available at: [URL]. Accessed 29/09/2018.
Jaworski, Adam, and Nicolas Coupland. 2006. The Discourse Reader. 2nd edition. Oxon: Routledge, 41–48.
Khosravinik, Majid. 2009. “The Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in British Newspapers during the Balkan Conflict (1999) and the British General Election (2005). Discourse & Society 20 (4): 477–498.
Klastrup, Lisbeth. 2015. “I didn’t know her, but...”: Parasocial Mourning of Mediated Deaths on Facebook RIP Pages”. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 1 (1–2): 146–164.
Klastrup, Lisbeth. 2018. “Death and Communal Mass-mourning: vin Diesel and the Remembrance of Paul Walker”. Social Media + Society 4 (1): 1–11.
Machin, David, and Andrea, Mayr. 2012. How to do Critical Discourse Analysis. A Multimodal Introduction. London: Sage.
Mortensen, Mette. 2017. “Constructing, Confirming and Contesting Icons: the Alan Kurdi Imagery Appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo”. Media, Culture and Society 39 (8): 1142–1161.
Olesen, Thomas. 2017. “Memetic Protest and the Dramatic Diffusion of Alan Kurdi”. Media, Culture and Society 40 (5): 656–672.
Page, Ruth. 2018. Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parker, Samuel. 2015. “‘Unwanted Invaders’. The Representation of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK and Australian Print Media”. eShapr23 (Myth and Nation). Available at: [URL].
Rae, Maria, Rosa Holman, and Amy Nethery. 2017. “Self-represented Witnessing: The Use of Social Media by Asylum Seekers in Australia’s Offshore Immigration Detention”. Media, Culture and Society 40 (4): 479–495.
Smith Dahmen, Nicole, Jesse Abdenour, Karen McIntyre, and Krystal E. Noga-Styron. 2018. “Covering Mass Shootings: Journalists’ Perceptions of Coverage and Factors Influencing Attitudes”. Journalism 12 (4): 456–476.
Sontag, Susan. 2004. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin.
Steimel, Sarah. 2010. “Refugees as People: The Portrayal of Refugees in American Human Interest Stories”. Journal of Refugee Stories 23(2): 219–237.
Tannen, Deborah, and Cynthia Wallat. 2006. “Interactive Frames and Knowledge Schemas in Interaction: Examples from a Medical Examination/Interview”. In The Discourse Reader, ed. by Adam Jaworski, and Nicolas Coupland, 2nd edition. 332–349. Oxon: Routledge.
Tewksbury, David. 2015. News Framing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Twitter. No date. a. “Connect or Revoke Access to Third Party apps”. Available at: [URL]. Accessed: 28/02/2018.
Twitter. No date. b. Twitter API. Available at: [URL]. Accessed: 28/02/2018/.
UK Legislation. 1998. Data Protection Act. Available at: [URL]. Accessed: 14/03/2018.
van Dijk, A. Teun. 1977. “Semantic Macro-Structures and Knowledge Frames in Discourse Comprehension.” In Cognitive Processes in Comprehension, ed. by M. A. Just, P. A. Carpenter, 3–32 New York, London: Taylor & Francis.
van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Leeuwen, Theo, and Carey Jewitt. 2000. Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Sage.
van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vis, Farida, and Olga Goriunova. 2015. “The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi”. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Available at: [URL]. Accessed: 18/09/2018.
Walker Rettberg, Jill, and Radhika Gajjala. 2016. Terrorists or Cowards: Negative Portrayals of Male Syrian Refugees in Social Media, Feminist Media Studies, 16 (1): 178–181.
Wallace, Rebecca. 2018. “Contextualising the Crisis: The Framing of Syrian Refugees in Canadian Print Media”. Canadian Journal of Political Science 51 (2): 207–231.
Walsh, Brian. 2015. “Alan Kurdi’s story: Behind the Most Heartbreaking Photo of 2015”. TIME Available at: [URL]. Accessed: 18/10/2018.
Wodak, Ruth. 2015. “Protecting Fortress Europe?” The Negotiation of ‘Borders’ and ‘Benchmarks’in National and EU Arenas.” Seminar presented at Forksning Centre.
Young Galloway, Katharine. 1987. Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
Zelizer, Barbie. 2010. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2023. ‘I especially loved the little Nana dancing on the balcony’: The emergence, formation, and circulation of chronotopes in mass-mediated communication. Language in Society 52:4 ► pp. 669 ff.
Fina, Anna De
2020. MIGRANT YOUTH PUSH BACK. VIRTUAL FRIENDSHIPS AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE IN THE DIGITAL SPHERE. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada 59:3 ► pp. 1833 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.