This paper presents an analysis of how Hizbullah’s Secretary General Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah attempts to project an alternative reading to what it means to be Lebanese. For this purpose, a selection of his speeches following late Lebanese PM Rafiq al-Hariri’s assassination in 2005 until shortly after Hizbullah’s defeat in the 2009 Lebanese parliamentary elections has been analyzed. This time period is of special interest as it entails Hizbullah’s shift from a primarily oppositional political player to one that actively seeks to be part of the national government and therefore has to appeal to a broad Lebanese audience, reaching far beyond its traditional constituents, Lebanon’s Shi'a. For the analysis, an interdisciplinary approach was followed. Borrowing from linguistics, methodology from Interactional Sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis was combined, building upon Bakhtin’s (1981) concepts of Dialogicality and Multivocality. Taking the indexical significance of language form for the construction of social meaning as a starting point, language choice was analyzed in relation to interactive frames and knowledge schema. In addition, looking into the employ of personal deixis proved to offer valuable insights into Nasrallah’s usage of intersubjectivity and positioning. The findings of this linguistic analysis were then put into context with insight gained from socio-political research on Hizbullah’s ideology, evolution and discourse. Hereby, this study not only calls for a greater degree of interdisciplinarity in the analysis of political phenomena, but also aims to show that Nasrallah’s linguistic choices help him to project – or even sell – a specific version of what it means to be Lebanese. This very form of identity marketing, rather than being a uniting force across the fragmented Lebanese society, as claimed, effectively reinforces existing boundaries and widens the gap between them.

Language and identity have played and important role in the Syrian conflict. At the beginning of the uprising, Bashar al-Asad alleged that the protestors were foreign infiltrators driven by sectarian intents. This paper analyzes how a group of dissidents constructed their identity as authentic Syrians on their personal and public Facebook pages through new, hybrid writing practices. Moreover, it shows how the deployment of these texts created participation and contributed to the emergence of new forms of dissent. Data for this paper come from a corpus of posts and comments published on a group of dissidents’ pages between 2011 and 2013. The methodology, informed by Barton and Lee’s (2013) mixed-method approach for the investigation of social media practices and Androtsoupolous’s (2007; 2013) online-centered ethnography, includes the analysis of texts and interviews with the authors and the readers. Findings are interpreted through Blommaert's (2007) notions of orders of indexicality and polycentricity, designed to investigate variation from the perspective of large social phenomena, such as migration, rather than as linguistic exception in putatively homogeneous speech communities. These concepts problematize previous conceptions of authority and prestige. The emergence of new prestigious forms in my data compete with previous prestigious forms valued within dominant linguistic ideology, such as ‘pure MSA’ and ‘pure Damascus Arabic’. It is argued that recent social and political events in Syria, such as conflict and migration, have led to the emergence of a hybrid style which problematizes and overthrows dominant linguistic ideology. By appropriating prior texts associated with distinct voices, the authors not only manage to construct a political stance of resistance and dissent, but also signal a distinct audience among their Facebook followers, who are stimulated to reflect on the meaning of the use of the hybrid variety. This study contributes to the literature on the Arab Spring and social media by showing how linguistic hybridity is deployed as an instrument of political activism to sustain dissent across an increasingly diasporic community and to enable a critical historical reflection of the conflict.

My study draws upon Cynthia Gordon’s (2008; 2009) concept of “framing as intertextuality in interaction” by applying her framework to written online contexts in an Arabic-speaking community. My dataset consists of posts from the micro-blogging social media site, Twitter, published in response to the Women2Drive campaign that took place on October 26, 2013, which called for Saudi women’s right to drive. I collected a sample of Twitter posts about the Women2Drive campaign from October 23 to October 27, and extracted the posts that generated the largest number of responses and re-tweets. These posts were published by Saudi women activists in support of a woman’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia and by men clerics who opposed a woman’s right to drive. I identified intertextuality as a primary means by which both groups framed the issue and aligned with their community and found that both women activists and men clerics utilized local texts to create a shared repertoire of “prior texts” (Becker, 1994) to justify their respective positions with respect to this campaign. In particular, men clerics used only Arabic in their tweets while the women activists used both Arabic and English in their posts and hashtags. As a consequence, women activists’ use of English situated theWomen2Drive campaign among audiences beyond the local Arabic community. By contrast, the men clerics’ exclusive use of Arabic served to reinforce conventional ideologies and cultural norms and orient their messages to the local Arabic community. The exclusive use of Arabic additionally contributed to the men’s framing of the campaign as a foreign conspiracy against the Saudi ethical and political system, while warning of potential societal consequences of the campaign. An intertextual approach to an analysis of Twitter discourse surrounding theWomen2Drive campaign highlights how both the women activists and men clerics framed the campaign to their respective audiences and it also illuminates our understanding of how larger societal issues are negotiated and contextualized within online discourse communities. Taking into account Becker’s claim that “the most public prior texts - the most widespread in a community - can be seen as defining that community” (1994: 166), this discourse-analytic study reinforces Gordon’s (2008; 2009) notions on the interconnectedness of framing and intertextuality. Furthermore, this study contributes to our understanding of power and gender hierarchies in a Saudi Arabian online community.

For the last 15 years, the government of Morocco has made education reform a top national development priority, and this effort has been underwritten by consecutive rounds of World Bank loans and foreign technical assistance. Despite some success in expanding access to primary and secondary education, the government and its donors have repeatedly noted that polices have fallen short in a crucial respect: improving outcomes through a more learner-centered pedagogy have done little to affect the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms (See World Bank 2005; CSE 2008a; World Bank 2013a: 16). For most Moroccans with a stake in the education system, this assessment is relatively uncontroversial. Though many disagree about causes and implications of the policy failure, few would argue that Morocco’s pedagogical reforms since 2000 have had a significant or broad-scale impact on how teachers do their jobs, or the resources available to them. Yet a uniformly negative assessment overlooks the divergent ways in which new norms of learner-centered teaching have been received and internalized by Morocco’s public teaching corps, even if these norms have not led to transformation of teacher practice on a mass scale. Using open-ended interviews with secondary teachers in provincial Morocco, I compare the perspectives of teachers of English and Arabic to reveal a significant disparity in how teachers of either language view the possibility for learner-centered pedagogy (LCP) within their classrooms. While English is commonly viewed as the most innovative and learner-centered subject in the curriculum, Arabic instruction and learning is widely regarded as in a state of crisis. I argue that this imbalance results from a mutually reinforcing relationship between inequality in pedagogical resources on the one hand, and on the other, implicit associations of certain foreign languages, especially English, with the notion and purpose of learner-centeredness. In this paper, I draw a parallel to Bourdieu and Passeron’s analysis of French higher education in the 1960’s (1977), in which emerging socio-political inequality in the educational system was “re-translated” as a failure of pedagogical communication. Similarly, Morocco finds itself in the midst of in the discourse of pedagogical crisis. By drawing attention to asymmetries of prestige, power and resources within this perceived pedagogical failure, it is possible to expose political roots of pedagogical inequality, and challenge the notion of a pedagogical best practice that can be neatly transferred from one context to the next.