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Expanding on classic theories of stancetaking and theorizing digital activism as nexus analysis, I examine how Omani Arab citizens used discourse and images to canalize a failed food boycott campaign on Twitter (X) into a united negative stance against alleged corruption. I highlight the role of multimodality, impoliteness, indirectness, intertextual references, participation framework and Arabic cultural practices in creating a multi-layered, accreted stance with manifold implicit functions (e.g., defining Omani identity, lamenting and signalling dissent). I argue for the need to widen the scope and level of analysis of stance acts to include interplays between texts, emoji, actions and images. I also highlight the role that stance can perform in expressing dissent and managing cultural face in the understudied Arabic context. I, therefore, demonstrate the multidimensionality of stance acts made visible by social media affordances and user creativity.

•Mobile phones are productively understood as cultural tools.•The link between mobile phones and identity is influenced by culture and gender.•Omani college women overwhelmingly orient to their phones as identity-relevant.•Ukrainian college men generally do not view their phones as identity-relevant.•American college women, more so than men, treat their phones as identity-relevant.

In Al Zidjaly (2011a; 2011b), I bring together multimodality and disability research in a novel way, proposing a new approach to studying visual texts, especially works of art. This approach developed from my in-depth case study of the artistic and other everyday practices of one man with a disability, including how these practices are socially co-constructed and culturally situated (in the Arab nation of Oman). It encompasses conceptualizing works of art, following mediated discourse theory (Scollon 2001), as mediated actions carried out by social actors to achieve intended outcomes, rather than just as mere tools for self-expression or representation, as prior research has. Doing this, I argue, foregrounds the power that resides in images of disability, and by extension, in any other works of art or multimodal texts; it also highlights the agency that people with disabilities and other creators of works of art might have. In this article, I build on such research by further opening the circumference of analysis to demonstrate the compelling reciprocal relationship between art and societal change. I do so by examining not just how art created by an individual at the “micro” level can lead to social change at the “macro” level, but also how social change at the macro level affects individual artistic practices. The analysis has theoretical and practical implications for research on disability, multimodality and artistic expression.