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In this article, I draw on contemporary theorizing on the concept of face (e.g., Ting-Toomey 1994, 2004; Tracy 2008) and research on Islamic and Arabic cultures and linguistic strategies (e.g., Beeman 1986; Hegland 1998; Wilce 2005; Al Zidjaly 2006) to explore the role that the Internet plays in enabling Muslim Arabs to manage or save their collective face online. I do so by examining the responses that Muslim Arabs from various nationalities and backgrounds post to the website of Al Jazeera, the noted Arabian political news agency, with regard to articles that attack their identity as Muslims. I identify three strategies that enable Muslim Arabs who post to the Al Jazeera website to productively engage in discussion and save collective face--self-praise, West-attack, and self-attack. In this study, I focus on the most widely-used strategy--self attack and demonstrate how self-attack is best understood as a form of "reasonable hostility" (Tracy 2008) in this particular online discussion forum because it saves collective face in a culturally--and contextually--appropriate way. The paper contributes toward developing a grounded practical theory of face (Craig 1989; Craig & Tracy 1995, 2008), to conceptualizing facework online as identity work, and to investigating identity construction at the group level. (Contains 5 notes.)

The article presents information on a disabled Omani individual and illustrates how he overcame the feelings of depression and suicide thoughts after his car accident. The person's quadriplegia is the result of a car accident in 1988. The person started using Microsoft PowerPoint software to create music videos made up of images to alleviate his disability in some sense. This gave him a creative outlet, enabling him to express his feelings about obstacles he faces as a disabled person in his particular sociocultural and familial contexts.

In this paper, I use nexus analysis framework to examine how one quadriplegic man from Oman, named Yahya, directs the course of his present (and his future) through anticipatory discourse. In particular, I analyze conversations between Yahya and me regarding his future as they relate to actions I undertake on his behalf to effect a social change: to secure Yahya, an unmarried man, a permit to hire his own resident nurse/assistant (permits for such hirings are reserved only for married couples in Oman). I demonstrate how Yahya influences me to follow his agenda through constructing a helpless identity in narrative discourse. Reciprocally, I suggest that through the actions Yahya's caregivers subsequently undertake, they succeed in giving him a sense of control over an important aspect of his life (being able to hire his own assistant), and I demonstrate how Yahya subsequently displays agentivity in his narratives. I thus illustrate the interconnectedness of Yahya's anticipatory discourse and his caregivers' (macro-level) actions that cause societal change, as well as the interconnectedness of these actions and the kinds of selves Yahya constructs through anticipatory discourse in private (micro-level) interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]