Discourse, platforms, and racialization: Danish Muslims navigating hegemonic Danishness on social media
Kristensen, Morten Stinus
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115640
Description
Title
Discourse, platforms, and racialization: Danish Muslims navigating hegemonic Danishness on social media
Author(s)
Kristensen, Morten Stinus
Issue Date
2022-04-20
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Valdivia, Angharad
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Valdivia, Angharad
Committee Member(s)
McCarthy, Cameron
Molina-Guzmán, Isabel
Rana, Junaid
Department of Study
Inst of Communications Rsch
Discipline
Communications and Media
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
media studies
social media
platform studies
racialization
muslims
anti-muslims racism
denmark
Abstract
This dissertation explores how Muslims living in Denmark engage the public through their social media activities. Starting from a Cultural Studies framework devoted to examining how meaning- making works at this juncture of shifting power relations within Danish culture generally and media more specifically, each chapter sheds light on a distinct element of these social media activities. Based on qualitative interviews with nine Muslims living in Denmark, the chapters respectively explore how the informants experience and reflect on: the ways in which digital infrastructures and platform affordances shape social media activities; the relations between mainstream media discourse and social media, and how to balance the two spheres; which manifest practices underlie these social media activities; and finally, a chapter devoted to how the informants online and offline navigate the dominant racial formation in Denmark, here termed hegemonic Danishness.
The informants produce a host of different types of content, from memes and informative videos to citizen journalism and mommy blogging and their experiences with and reflections on social media differ very much although there are also many similarities, particularly in how they each develop strategies for engaging social media’s digital infrastructures such as its interactive character or blurring of private/public dichotomies. With this as well as their diverse background, the informants represent the immense heterogeneity of the population Muslims living in Denmark who, the dissertation argues, has been racialized as Danish Muslims through decades of political rhetoric and media coverage. The dissertation finds that a central factor in the informants’ reflections on why they engage social media is that they find that site of meaning making better suited than mainstream media for providing accurate representations of Muslimness and Danish Muslims. Yet, the informants also consistently express a desire to contribute to mainstream media, suggesting a fluid relation between the two mediaspheres rather than a rigidly divided binary.
The dissertation discusses whether the informants can be considered part of emerging Danish Muslim counterpublic providing a fuller and richer representation of what it means to be Muslim in Denmark than what is on offer on mainstream media. Arguing that Danish mainstream media has been a key element in producing a racialized difference between the two categories Danish and Muslim, the dissertation provides a novel case study of how Muslims living in Denmark perform distinct media work to navigate this racial formation. Rather than going against these categories, the informants generally describe themselves as situated in between the categories of Danish and Muslim and as being invested in broadening the idea of what it means to be Danish. While they find it difficult to express such in-between, hybrid identities in a mainstream media that remains overly reliant on narrow framings of what it means to be Muslim, they through varied social media activities claim belonging within Danishness.
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