Syrian Diasporic Radio: Self-Mediation in Disjunctured Temporalities and Localities

This study provides a qualitative reading of the diasporic radio discourses that emerged following the Syrian uprisings in 2011. It explores radio discourse as a contested and relational site of power. The research addresses the following key questions: How were the transformations in social processes in a post-revolutionary society represented in the discursive practice of the Syrian diasporic media? To what extent was Syrian diasporic radio able to enact an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation in a post-revolutionary context? and How does the structural power of political economy shape the sustainability of the Syrian diasporic media as a field?

This study contributes to theoretical debates on the mediated practices of self-representation, agency and transnational imagination. It also grounds these debates in the overarching power of the political economy through conceptualising the Syrian diasporic media as a field with different forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1977; 1984). This research shifts the dominant academic focus from the study of the practices of journalism to examining the discourses of the diasporic radios as a site for the empirical. To explore the dynamics of discourse production, I employ Critical Discourse Analysis to study 23 episodes from 11 programmes broadcast on two digital diasporic radios: Rozana and SouriaLi. I also embed Carvalho’s (2008) reinterpretation of CDA to integrate the agency of the social actors (the diasporic interlocutors) and the impact of the changing temporal rhythms on the dynamics of text production as part of the analytical framework. Using empirical evidence from the research, the study demonstrates how the mediation of a collective Syrianness in the diasporic radios is increasingly challenged by the contrasting realities in different localities within the Syrian context between home and the diaspora, resulting in spatial asymmetries to sites of representation (Couldry, 2008). It also elucidates the ways in which the governmentality (Foucault, 1977) of diasporic radio funding shapes the dynamics of discourse production. The study warrants a revision of the universality of discursive frames such as “oppositional media” (Badran, 2020) and challenges the previously held assumption about the emerging mediascape as a “de facto local media” (Tatomir et al., 2020).