From Streets to Screens: Seriality and Political Communication in Iran's "Women, Life, Freedom" Movement

Abstract

The proposed research investigates the role of seriality in the digital political communication of Iranian protest movements, with particular focus on the "Women, Life, Freedom" uprising. Building on scholarship on media seriality and political storytelling, the article examines how protesters employed recurring hashtags, episodic video updates, and viral formats across platforms such as Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok to produce an alternative narrative structure that opposed state-controlled discourse. The analysis conceptualises these practices as a form of "episodic dissent," where individual posts function as discrete narrative units while simultaneously contributing to a continuous storyline of resistance. The paper will argue that seriality served three principal functions: first, it established temporal continuity, allowing dispersed acts of protest to be framed as unfolding episodes within a larger struggle; second, it fostered participatory engagement by inviting users to reproduce and adapt recurring formats; and third, it generated a cumulative archive that strengthened transnational solidarity and countered the erasure produced by censorship. By situating Iranian digital activism within the logic of serial communication, the article contributes to broader debates on the relationship between media form and political practice, demonstrating how seriality operates as both a narrative strategy and a mode of collective resistance under authoritarian conditions.