Tweet Like It’s Free: Towards a Palestinian Futurism with Sulafa Zidani
December 12 @ 3:00 pm
In June of 2021, as the events that later became known as the Unity Uprising were unfolding, stories from a liberated Palestine began emerging on Twitter. Using the hashtag #غرد_كانها_حرة (#tweet_like_it’s_free), people created 250-character stories from a desired future in which the military barriers and cement walls dividing Palestinian communities no longer existed. In this talk, Dr. Zidani will discuss her study of a dataset of 600 tweets from June 2021 that use the hashtag #tweet_like_it’s_free. The study identifies the narratives of a liberated Palestine and unpacks the meanings of freedom. Drawing on her expertise in global digital media, Dr. Zidani explores the role of collective imagining as a futurist practice that holds power in undoing fragmentation, emphasizing relationship to the land, and disrupting a seemingly impenetrable status quo. She argues that playful and experimental practice like collective imagination are a necessary part of political practices that push towards a liberated future.
About Sulafa Zidani
Sulafa Zidani is a scholar of global digital culture at Northwestern University, where she is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies. She also holds an affiliation with Northwestern Qatar’s Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South. Through her scholarship, teaching, and public engagement, she takes part in building justice-informed media practices.
She is currently working on her first book project, All Your Meme Are Belong To Us: Internet Cultures in the Global South, which explores creative practices in online civic engagement across geopolitical contexts and languages such as Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French.
She has published on online culture mixing, Arab and Chinese media politics, and critical transnational pedagogy in venues such as: Media, Culture & Society; International Journal of Communication, and Information, Communication and Society. She is also a co-editor for the forthcoming anthology, The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Resistance Online (Fall 2023).
Dr. Zidani is an award-winning teacher and public intellectual. She has given academic and public-engaged talks and workshops in more than 11 countries. She is on the editorial board of Pop Junctions, and serves as an advisory board member for the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, and The Cookout AI Project.