Women, Daesh and discourse: a critical analysis

Specifically, they are made “visible” only insofar as their stories reinforce gendered ideas about what it is to be a woman, and more specifically, what it is to be a woman in the Middle East. My thesis takes as its case the representations of such women constructed between 2013-2017 by the BBC, the Daily Mail, Sky News, and the Guardian. Operating within a feminist framework, my aims are two-fold.

Focusing first on news discourse, I use a critical discourse analytical framework to investigate the ways in which women in Syria and Iraq are represented in 245 news articles. Recognising that the news media and the ideologies that they propagate have the power to shape public perception, my aim is to uncover and examine the assumptions relied upon to construct a specific image of the conflict and its participants. As part of this analysis, I consider the implications of such representations, namely their societal function and their impact on the construction of knowledge.

Arguing that in order for women to be made truly visible, their voices must be heard, I also engage in a narrative analysis of the stories of women sourced through personal interviews with refugees living in Belfast, survivor (auto)biographies, social media posts, and third-party interviews. In engaging with such stories, my aim is to deconstruct and redefine the knowledge constructed through UK news media representations by examining the ways in which women’s stories challenge and disrupt it.<br>