Political Memes and Affective Polarization: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani Political Memes
Keywords:
Political memes, MCDA, affective polarization, de-legitimization, dehumanization, us versus them, labelling, and trivialization.Abstract
Abstract
Political memes play an integral role in shaping online political discourses by communicating political identities, affiliations and views with the opportunity for the audiences to engage in such discourses. However, some of the discourses in the memes are intendant to demonize, criticize, differentiate, attack, and or negatively evaluate certain political parties and politicians. Therefore, this article adopts a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to study the discourses of some of the Pakistani political memes on Twitter in relation to affective polarization. That is, the aim of this study is to examine the presence of affective polarization in the discourses of political memes to know whether and how does political memes catalyze affective polarization. This analysis reveals that, the political memes catalyze affective polarization through its discourses dominated by (de)legitimization, labelling, us versus them differentiation, dehumanization, and trivialization.
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