“We must be their voices!” : exploring Danish-Iranian women’s emotional engagement with the Woman Life Freedom movement on Instagram and beyond

Abstract: The present study explores how Danish-Iranian Women living in Copenhagen witness and take part in the connective Woman Life Freedom movement, online and from afar. It seeks to investigate their emotional engagement with Instagram, their political participation and their sense of belonging in this process. With a media studies perspective, the study works in the intersection between civic engagement and diaspora. It contributes with knowledge about translocality – how local lifeworlds are linked by media. Placing emotions and affect at the centre of a media engagement analysis, the study resonates with a tendency among media studies of civic engagement to pay attention to how people feel. However, by investigating the impact of emotional media engagement on diasporic sense of belonging, it unveils an underexplored area in media research. This thesis project is carried out from a non-media-centric and digital ethnographic approach. The empirical material is comprised by semi-structured ethnographic interviews with ten Danish-Iranian women. With an affect-theoretical approach, the study identifies how three types of Instagram content pull the Danish-Iranian women towards the Woman Life Freedom movement. It finds that their loyal and passionate media engagement crystalises into online and offline political participation in a Danish context in which they struggle to drive their agenda forward. The thesis argues that the Danish-Iranian women’s emotional engagement with Instagram leads to the formation of a civic culture and diasporic community to which they feel a sense of belonging. It makes them relocate in a new local diasporic network that allows for hybridity between a Danish and an Iranian context. The local and offline aspect of this network evokes the emotional experience of feeling at home. This finding is significant as most contemporary media research of diaspora focuses on sense of belonging to an online network. This is nuanced by the present study that underscores the relevance of paying attention to the impact of online connectivity on social ties in local places.