Talk’s title: Multisemioticity and the Performance and Evaluation of (Migrant-)Iranianness Online: a Chronotopic-scalar Approach
Abstract:
In this talk, I investigate the (meta)linguistic and (meta)semiotic processes through which identities are constructed, negotiated, and evaluated online and explore how these processes are guided by social actors’ perceptions of online and offline normativities. Following online and offline ethnography and drawing on different types of online data (including tweet texts, photos, videos, Internet memes, comments, etc.) from different social media platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Twitter), I focus on online practices of Iranian social media users within and outside Iran to examine how their normative understandings—of contexts, identities, and linguistic/semiotic behavior— lead to the (collective) construction and evaluation of identities at various scale-levels, including more saliently ‘local’, ‘national’, and ‘trans-national’ levels. My ethnographically-grounded analysis is conducted within a choronotopic-scalar framework which I demonstrate provides the necessary analytical-theoretical tools to capture the nuances and intricacies of the online identity work. This research has theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications that contribute to the scholarship on online sociolinguistics and sociolinguistics of mobility and transnationality.
