Political narrating in non-political crises: narrativity practices on Persian Twitter during the 2017 Kermanshah earthquake

Abstract

This paper investigates the narrativity practices on Persian Twitter. It explores how a narrative is produced on Twitter, identifies the popular narratives and investigates the connections between these popular narratives and the political and social narratives in Iran during non-political happenings. Using KhosraviNik’s model of critical discourse studies, it sampled a tweet corpus of 23,964 tweets, gathered in the first 24 h after the 2017 Kermanshah earthquake in Iran. Three different kinds of narratives were found on Persian Twitter: contained narratives, master narratives, and connective narratives. Although these narratives lack some features of a classic narrative, they generally have the essential elements of narrativity. The findings also confirmed that popular narratives mainly advocate anti-state views and opinions. In fact, users framed and narrated the crisis by applying preexistent and emergent political stories to them.