Embedded in Crisis: Narratives, (Social) Media and Activism

Abstract

The media do not unilaterally dictate the ideas for recipients to think about, but provide an important context for the dissemination of content and shared ideas, which are then continually re-appropriated, reinterpreted and transformed in social interaction. The media is vital in informing people, broadening public views and understanding of the state of emergency, including the disclosure of threats to national security, democracy, rights and freedoms. It plays a central role mainly because it conveys a certain idea of imagining the 'real'. In this sense, the media have an immense influence on how we collectively perceive democracy, how we perceive its challenges and what our beliefs, judgements and attitudes are. Because of their potential as a mechanism of truth production media have attracted the interest of political actors, especially political elites and civil society, who increasingly use the media as a strategic resource to influence public opinion, engage with their supporters, legitimise political positions and galvanize support. The modern media have in this view become a site of communication between the press, politicians, civil society and citizens – they have become a dynamic "battlefield" where different social actors employ diverse practices, produce different, often contradictory narratives and engage in an ongoing political struggle for temporary fixation of the meaning of human rights and freedoms. This panel looks at (social) media narratives in four different national contexts. The first paper presents how Slovenian journalists portrayed freedom of expression and assembly during the social closure and the Covid 19 pandemic. The second contribution examines how print and social media reconstructed key narrative strategies and contextualises them in the broader dynamics of policy conflict around poverty in Germany; in this way, the contribution explains how poverty is discursively constructed, debated and politically thematised in the midst of major reform changes. The third contribution draws on a wide selection of data from Egyptian and Belarusian online newspapers and uses the gender perspective to compare the protests in Belarus in 2020 with the Arab Spring and its aftermath in Egypt (2011-13) to show a close connection between authoritarianism and militarised hegemonic masculinities that can be identified across regions and cultures.

Title	Details
Media narratives during the Covid-19 emergency in Slovenia	View Paper Details
Breaking the Silence in a Crisis: Disrupting the German Poverty Discourse via Everyday Storytelling on Social Media	View Paper Details
Authoritarian Hegemonic Masculinities and Gendered Rhetorics of the Protest 2020 Belarus Awakening and the Arab Spring in Egypt	View Paper Details