Peace and Conflict Studies
Abstract
This paper applies corpus linguistic discourse analysis to approach the social media discourse of a recent political movement in Iran, known as #WomanLifeFreedom and Mahsa Amini. The movement included vast protests in different parts of Iran and went viral on an international scale. Protesters relied heavily on social media, particularly Twitter, to determine strategies and support each other during the expansive calls. To address the discourse shaped in that platform, a corpus was compiled from the Twitter posts, named Mahsa Amini Tweets Corpus (MATC). Using this data collection and analysis method, the endeavour was to obtain a balance between quantitative and qualitative analyses, which did not receive due attention from the social scientists who have studied the movement ever since it took place. This paper addresses collective ‘you’ and ‘we’ identities through an elaborate analysis of speech acts. Overall, 11 speech act categories specified by first- and second-person plurals resurfaced, and their functions were extracted. Moreover, the identities that Twitter protesters had referred to were recognised to have inclusive and exclusive tendencies; therefore, the implications of forming conflict identities for protesters and Iranian society are discussed.
Keywords
speech acts, collective identity, discourse of protest, Mahsa Amini
Recommended Citation
Roohani, Kimiya
(2025)
"‘You’ and ‘We’ in #WomanLifeFreedom: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Collective Identities and Speech Acts in the Twitter’s Discourse of Iranian Protests,"
Peace and Conflict Studies: Vol. 32:
No.
1, Article 3.
Available at:
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs/vol32/iss1/3