Representation of Margins in Emergent Political Communication Ecologies: Narratives around Islam on French Twitter

The last decade has seen the rise of Twitter as one of the most essential instruments of political communication and power. It appears that Twitter has been far more effectual in reaching the masses and even voicing the masses than what the traditional media has historically been able to do. In this proposal, we investigate narratives surrounding Islam on the French Twitter, its correlation with gender discrimination and the EU immigrant crisis and how it is construed as a social threat in media. I begin by underlining that there is no country devoid of gender disparity and no Western country is immune to discrimination towards Muslims either. Based on my preliminary Twitter data, and using femonationalism as an ideology, critical discourse analysis and mixed methods the paper tries to study that Twitter users are observing a principally malicious label of Muslims perpetrated by the usual suspects like big media houses and politicians, as identified by actor analysis. We use mixed computational methodologies like topic modelling (top2vec) to observe their varied theme surrounding Islam . This large-scale investigation of divisive inequitable discourse on Twitter with gendered narratives is expected to advance our sociological understanding of communal methods that (re-)produce disparities in France. Overall, the paper is expected to enhance understanding of the link between framing, power, group, interests, and inequalities. Moreover, these narratives could prevent the ‘native’ French people from properly comprehending the true nature of Muslims, whom they would continue to fear, discriminate and otherize from the 'native' French, thereby constructing a France that is the very opposite of the nation it was founded to be – a nation built on the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Finally, the project would also help us understand if the emergent political ecologies like Twitter voice the margins at all, and if so, 'Can the subaltern speak?'