The Shared Story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter: Story Participation and Stancetaking in Visual Small Stories

Giaxoglou, Korina and Spilioti, Tereza (2020). The Shared Story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter: Story Participation and Stancetaking in Visual Small Stories. Pragmatics, 30(2) pp. 277–302.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18057.gia

Abstract

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.

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