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Not Just About a Piece of Cloth: Three Content Analysis of an Online Anti-Mandatory Hijab Movement in Iran

This dissertation investigates the My Stealthy Freedom (MSF) movement, an online movement against mandatory hijab laws in Iran, building on two leading lead social movements' theories, political processes and framing processes theories. Study 1 explores the utility of a tactical approach for explaining the movement's pace of insurgency. I employ a conceptual repertoire focused upon the political process model's core concepts of tactical innovation and tactical adaptations, supplementing these older concepts with the more recently proposed concept of tactical freeze and a newly proposed concept of tactical hashtags that is of particular relevance to online movements. Study 2 focuses on extracting hidden patterns and emotional characteristics in the MSF movement by conducting a topic modeling study on the text appearing in the captions of the main account of the movement on Instagram. It was shown that the actions of Masih Alinejad, the founder of the movement, represented by her online activity and extracted by means of topic modeling, is directly affected by the sequence of important events happening in Iran concluding to a transformation of a social movement to political one. Study 3 models how social movements use social media in the formation of affective publics and apply this model to Instagram post data from the MSF movement. Thematic analysis applied to samples of posts and comments revealed six main themes, one of which, aggression, includes three subthemes related to verbal aggression and physical violence. As the level of aggression increased in Instagram videos, the level of aggression in the comments increased as well, and videos containing verbal aggression and physical violence had more likes and comments than did non-aggressive and non-violent videos. In the conclusion, I consider implications of the three studies for social movement framing research and research on emotions and social movements.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1808418
Date05 1900
CreatorsBasmechi, Farinaz
ContributorsIgnatow, Gabe, Barnes, Donna, McCaffree, Kevin
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatvii, 109 pages, Text
RightsPublic, Basmechi, Farinaz, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved.

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