Social media discourses of Arabism and the negotiation of Self in the Middle East.

Positioned within and contributing to the body of scholarship around Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM‐CDS) and as part of a larger research project examining digitally mediated discourses of regional/national(ist) identity within 'social media paradigm of communication' (KhosraviNik, 2017a), the current paper explores various discursive manifestations of an imagined pan‐Arab identity in a body of user‐generated content on digital platforms. The paper aims to integrate social media theories with critical discourse studies to explore the linguistic, technological, and argumentative aspects of an under‐researched conflict in the Middle East by investigating bottom‐up discursive practices. Confronted with the hegemony of English in scholarly publishing and the challenges of recontextualizing source texts especially in cross language qualitative research, the paper also sheds some light on translation challenges and their implications on data analysis and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]