Digital Feminist Activism and Imagining the Future: Case Study of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” Movement in Iran
In my research, I turn to Iranian women’s collective imagination of the future by focusing on the experience of digital feminist activism during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. The death of Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022 at the hands of morality police sparked massive street protests in Iran primarily led by women and unfolded on digital media platforms. Jina’s tragic death evoked different emotions: anger, sadness, despair, and hope. People, specifically women, started to share their experiences, emotions, and memories of inequality on digital spaces. The focus of this research is on the formation of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015) and on digital media platforms, resulting in the articulation of hope and alternative futures. I am using affect theory (Ahmed, 2014; Wetherell, 2012) to discuss the emotion sharing on social media platforms. The research draws on digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis of an archive of online images and texts and life narratives elicited by semi-structured interviews with female active participants in the movement.
Main Research Topics
- Digital Feminist Activism
- Affect and Emotion Studies
- Digital and Affective Labour
- Mediated Memory
Research Results
During my fellowship at CAIS, I worked on 10 semi-structured interviews conducted with ten women who were digitally active on social media platforms (X and Instagram) during the first eight months of the distinct moment of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran. This research focused on emotion-sharing on social media platforms and the articulation of hope by Iranian women during the uprising. The study draws on the analysis of online images and texts published on X and on life narratives shared by women. The research argues that the use of social media platforms could effectively enable the users to share their various emotions and revisit their experiences to imagine a new collective future for Iranian women at times of militarized aggression. The life narratives reinforce the interpretation of social media posts as public spaces of resistance functioning as a collective space of alternative political action of hope.
Conference Presentations:
- Shamsi, A. (2024, June 5). Digital Feminist Activism and Imagining the Future: The case study of WLF in Iran. ASCA Workshop: Resistance, Refusal, Fugitivity, Amsterdam University, Netherlands.
- Shamsi, A. (2024, June 17). Feminist Influencers and Affective Labour, Imagining femenist Futures. Imagining Possible Futures Conference, University of JyväSkylä, Finland.
Curriculum Vitae
- 2023 MA, Gender Studies, Central European University, Gender Studies Department, Vienna, Austria
- 2018 MA, International Communication and Development, Department of Social Science, City University of London, UK
- 2011 BSc, Media and Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Iran
- 2011-2016 Journalist, Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA), Tehran, Iran
- 2018-2022 PR and Social Media Content Manager, Snapp Group Co. Tehran, Iran
Publication and Presentations
- A.Shamsi (4-6 September 2023), Digital Feminist Activism, and Imagining the Future, Atgender Conference, Feminist Pedagogy of/beyond Borders, European Feminist Research Conferences, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey
- A.Shamsi (19-20 June 2023), The collective Memory of Hejab and Transformation of Meaning, (Poster presentation), TRANSforming Research: Feminist, Experimental, and Arts-Based Practices Conference, Central European University, Vienna, Austria
- A.Shamsi (8th December 2022), Panel discussion, Visual Analysis of “Woman, Life, Freedom” Movement’s Social Media Contents, Central European University, Vienna, Austria