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In this paper, the form and function of personalized Covid-19 WhatsApp sticker memes created and shared as social laments by citizens in Oman are examined. The compiled data set of 288 WhatsApp stickers was taken from a larger ethnographic project on Arabs and Covid-19. To collect and analyze the data, perspectives from visual semiotics were integrated with participatory and geosemiotic approaches to ground the stickers socially and globally. Six functions of Covid-19 WhatsApp stickers in Oman were identified: expressing political dissent, creating public signs, promoting religious agenda, indexing frustration, expressing levity, and constructing counter-discourse. Based on this analysis, it is suggested that by creating and using WhatsApp stickers during the 2020–2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Omani citizens positioned themselves as agentive participants in charge of their own lives, thus, solidifying a decade-long request for a new form of public-government relationship. The paper adds to research on Arabic digital communication and pandemic discourse.

The unprecedented expansion of wireless technologies and the global pandemic of 2020-2021, which forced many educational establishments out of traditional face-to-face and into online instructional environments, have created an urgency for achieving a better understanding of the various education-related uses of mobile phones, and students’ attitudes toward them, worldwide. We conducted a questionnaire-based study to explore college undergraduate students’ perceptions and uses of mobile phones, with a focus on instructor-student communication and classroom use, across three diverse cultural contexts: Ukraine, Oman, and the United States. Based on our findings, we suggest that conceptualizing mobile phones as cultural tools and situating their use within cultural discourses illuminates how – and explains why – mobile phones are not “the same” tools for all students. The findings offer insights into students’ (developing) perspectives on uses of mobile phones, and provide grounds from which to formulate productive, and culturally appropriate, means of using them for educational purposes.

In this article, I investigate how political dissent is linguistically constructed and mitigated in memes that are circulated nationally on WhatsApp in Oman. I do so by drawing upon insights from relational approaches to face, the theorization of communicative strategies as polysemous and ambiguous, and research pertaining to the Islamic practice of lamenting. The data consist of a representative set of memes collected in the summer and fall of 2015 as part of an ethnographic project on social media and Arab identity. I theorize memes as cultural tools that take the form of ‘reasonably hostile’ lament-narratives, which enable citizens in Oman to engage in democracy while saving face. To create lament-memes that voice dissent while mitigating face-attacks, Omanis draw upon various communicative strategies: They use repetition, code choice, hashtags, and different genres; they juxtapose emojis with text; and they manipulate the production and participation frameworks of texts. Collectively, these strategies, which function via intertextuality, allow the concerns to be aired, but indirectly and playfully. The article demonstrates how political dissent is negotiated and mitigated through memes, the agency of social media users, and the validity of conceptualizing memes as cultural tools.

This study explores the relationship between mobile phones and users’ identities in three cultures that differ geographically, historically, and culturally: Oman, an Islamic social monarchy in the Arabian Gulf; Ukraine, a post-Soviet Eastern European country; and the United States of America. A Likert-style questionnaire that also included open-ended questions was distributed to 393 college students to elicit answers on how they relate to their mobile phones. Findings indicate that mobile phone users of different nationalities and genders perceive and use their mobile phones differently for self-expression and identity display, with Omani women most likely to orient to their phones as identity-relevant, and Ukrainian men least likely to do so. Americans showed more mixed results, with American women more prone to treat their mobile phones as objects that relate to identity expression. Further, while Ukrainians and Americans tended to view their mobile phones primarily through the lens of utility, Omanis tended to take a more affective/romantic perspective. To explain these findings, we demonstrate, following Al Zidjaly and Gordon (2012), that mobile phones are productively understood as what Scollon (2001) calls cultural tools, or the material and symbolic means people use in culturally- and historically-enabled and -constrained ways to accomplish actions such as identity display.

This study explores how agency emerges and is negotiated moment by moment in interaction by applying Erving Goffman’s notion of production format to an extended sequence of discourse that revolves around accomplishing a conjoint action: the rewriting of an official letter. Deconstructing the participants into the social roles they undertake in accomplishing this task illustrates what is involved in exercising agency: interactively negotiating production format roles and footing shifts through several linguistic strategies aimed at either claiming, ratifying, or rejecting the participants’ agency. These include providing options, negotiating production format roles, asking questions, speaking for another, questioning and asserting expertise, providing counter-arguments, and asserting past agentive selves. This study, thus, contributes to an understanding of agency as co-constructed, mediated, and continually negotiated, while also identifying specific linguistic strategies through which agency is negotiated in interaction. (Agency, disability, production format, social actor, conjoint action, linguistic strategies)*

In this chapter, I further examine the cyclical relationship between micro and macro discourses and actions by demonstrating how Yahya complements his music videos, in which he gets the lower hand, by constructing helpless selves in hypothetical narratives. It is through these various efforts that Yahya pursues his agenda to become in control of hiring his own resident assistants. I examine the relationship between hypothetical narratives and larger social practices by conceptualizing these narratives as mediated actions Yahya strategically uses to direct my and others’ actions. I suggest that Yahya’s caregivers’ subsequent actions reciprocally give him a sense of control over an important aspect of his life (being able to hire his own assistant), resulting in him displaying agentivity in his narratives. I thus illustrate the interconnectedness of Yahya’s anticipatory discourse and his caregivers’ actions that cause societal change. Interconnectedness between these actions and the kinds of selves Yahya constructs through hypothetical narratives in private interactions also is evident. I illustrate how my actions on his behalf to garner social change (macro level) lead him to construct agentive selves in the narratives he constructs about his future (micro level), hence, demonstrating how the micro-macro relationship is realized through language, in addition to art made by Microsoft PowerPoint (see Chapter 3).

In this chapter, I address the relationship between language and disability, an important, yet underexamined connection in both disability studies and discourse analysis. I do so by exploring the discursive strategies used by Yahya and two of his caregivers. It is through these strategies that they interactively achieve processes of inclusion and exclusion. In Chapters 3 and 4, I scrutinized at a broader level how Yahya exercises agency and ultimately creates inclusion with his family and society through computer-related actions and hypothetical narratives. In addition to problematizing the boundaries between social actors and mediational means, I have illustrated how Yahya’s agency in practice is intertwined with and emerges from distributed actions divided among multiple social actors. I now turn to examining the nature of this distribution further. I do so by extending Goffman’s (1981) production format roles and applying them to the analysis of a conjoint action— the rewriting of a letter that was originally written by Yahya to the mayor of his hometown requesting his approval for the permit allowing Yahya to hire his own resident assistants. This incident takes place after I agree to help Yahya’s mission to own the resident assistant permit. The findings of this chapter demonstrate the active role that one individual with a disability plays in claiming power over emerging discourse, and in interactively negotiating his role in the conjoint action that would grant him some form of control over in important area of his life.

A main objective of this book is to capture the lived experience of living with a disability in Oman and the role that Yahya, as a seemingly dependent agent, plays in combating personal and social exclusion through language, art and technology. Thus, in this chapter, I contextualize the study by providing background information on the status of disability in Oman which impacts Yahya’s experiences, and introduce the key participants of the project, mainly Yahya. The power of visual/multimodal texts to create agency (inclusion) or disability (exclusion) is a running theme in this book; henceforth, in introducing societal discourses and Yahya, I draw upon Omani government images of disability and Yahya’s music videos created by Microsoft PowerPoint (these videos will be analyzed in more detail in Chapter 3). However, I delve into this tool traditionally known for self-expression and representation in a novel way, in the hope that it will guide the government of Oman, and other governments as well, to be mindful of the images of disability they routinely use in their discourse on disability.

This chapter scrutinizes the interconnection between technology, art and disability, on one hand, and the interconnection between micro, artistic actions and broader social change, on the other. In particular, it demonstrates how Yahya draws upon a mediational means (Microsoft PowerPoint) to create actions (animated music videos) that are strategically used to fray both interpersonal and social exclusion. To capture the link between Yahya’s actions and larger personal and social change, I do two things. First, I propose a new approach to studying visual texts, especially works of art.1 In this new conceptualization, art is theorized as mediated actions carried out by social actors to achieve intended outcomes, rather than being positioned as mere tools for self-expression or representation, as in prior research. Second, I open up the parameter of analysis to include in addition to Yahya’s actions, my own actions (on Yahya’s behalf) on a broader social level. Attention is thus given to how actions or practices are socially co-constructed and culturally situated. Conceptualizing art as mediated action and going beyond bounded face-to-face interactions or actions, as aforementioned in Chapter 2, foregrounds the power that resides in images of disability and, by extension, in any other works of art. The proposed framework in addition highlights the agency that people with disabilities might have.

Thus far, I have examined how Yahya creates inclusion with family and Omani society through computer-related actions and narrative and non-narrative discourse. In this chapter, I delve further into how Yahya creates inclusion with the international community by participating in political and religious Yahoo chatrooms, thereby tackling another understudied relationship— that between disability, identity and the Internet. This chapter contributes to the theoretical extension of the Bakhtinian theory of intertextuality (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; see also Kristeva, 1967/1986) by extending it to computer-mediated discourse in analyzing particularly religious identities. To support this argument, I identify and illuminate intertextual links to specifically explore the role that the Internet plays in the online discursive construction of one specific Islamic religious identity: that of an enlightener, meaning someone whose mission is to explain Islam to insiders and defend it to outsiders. Yahya created this self-identity in response to international political discourses concerning Muslim Arab identity. The focus of this chapter thus is not so much on Yahya’s disability, but rather on how Yahya uses online Yahoo chatrooms as a mediational means to create actions that keep him included in the international community equal to any other participant and which also acknowledges him as a scholarly leader and a respected member of the group who has come to shape religious discourses and practices online and offline.

On the evening of January 4, 2002, during a one-month pilot study, Yahya, a 46-year-old Omani man with quadriplegia, of whom I am a friend and a caregiver, expressed his wish to take his daily shower. I promptly obliged by interrupting the conversation I was involved in with his sister, Fatima, and called out for his resident assistant from India, requesting that she fetch Yahya’s commode chair. Upon hearing my request, the assistant, who had been caring for Yahya for one year, similarly interrupted the action she was involved in (washing the dishes) and hurried to the main bathroom where Yahya’s commode chair was seated. Yahya’s teenage nephew, Hythum, also offered his help upon entering Yahya’s room. As the assistant placed the commode chair in the right angle at the right side of Yahya’s bed and took her position behind the commode chair, the following series of negotiations between the five of us ensued (these were captured by video-recorder and occurred in Arabic; what follows is the English translation):1 Hythum: ((addressing Najma)) You want to lift Yahya Or you want me to do it Najma: I’ll lift now Fatima: Come on, Hythum, You are a man now

The book is about inclusion in (inter)action. The focus was manifold: to introduce to disability discourse an original theory of human action that explores the relationship between disability and innumerable mediational means (e.g., technology, hypothetical narratives, non-narrative discourse and Yahoo chats); to advocate a disability theory that conceives of art, technology-related practices and discourse as mediated actions and not just as tools of representation or expression; to deconstruct how we traditionally conceive of the capabilities of those with disabilities and the roles they, their caregivers and mediational means such as computers play in their lives; to highlight how agency in practice is intertwined with and emerges from distributed actions divided among multiple social actors; and to illustrate the importance of conducting longitudinal, ethnographic analysis in disability studies that take into account the discourses and actions of all involved and which lie outside locally-situated interactions. I now turn to concluding remarks. I take the position that mediated discourse projects are not resources through which to bring about closure by providing finalizable answers, thus, resolving the intricacies inherent in social situations. In contrast, following Scollon and Scollon (2004), they are tools by which we open up the process of dialogue and interrogation with the underlying goal of bringing about social change.

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.

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.

KeywordsDisability, Art, Technology, Social Exclusion, Social Inclusion, Agency, Mediated Actio, Culture, OmanAbstractThe compelling role that art plays in managing emotions and healing is well documented in disability research (Ainsworth-Vaughn, 1998; Corbett, 1999; Al Zidjaly, 2005, 2007). The strategic role that art can play in combating social exclusion and inciting societal change, however, is under-examined. This article extends recent developments in multimodality that build on mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 2001) to fill this gap. It demonstrates how a person with a disability from the Islamic Arab country Oman, where the outdated medical model of disability still prevails, strategically uses a semiotic resource (Microsoft PowerPoint) to create mediated actions (animated music videos) that manage interpersonal and social exclusion. I specifically focus on how Yahya, creatively draws on various cultural customs in making these music videos. I also show how this plays a role in not only alleviating disability's effect on Yahya's social life, but also in leading to wider social change. In viewing art as a form of mediated action, this study has far-reaching consequences for both disability and multimodality studies—in particular, regarding the various multimodal ways through which exclusion can be managed. The study also contributes to our understanding of disability and its relationship to art and technology in a non-Western culture.

This chapter explores, from a sociolinguistic perspective, the role that the Internet plays in the online discursive construction of the Islamic religious identity of an enlightener. It does so by examining chatroom conversations between a man with a disability from the Islamic Arabian country, Oman and individuals of diverse religious backgrounds and nationalities with whom he frequently chats. The chapter illustrates how an enlightener identity is constructed through juxtaposing two contrastive religious identities: a liberal identity (when interacting with other Muslims) and a far more traditional one (when interacting with non-Muslims). The findings of the study suggest that the Internet is helping transform many Islamic discourses from being “authoritative,” i.e., unquestioned, to being “internally persuasive,” i.e., open for debate (Bakhtin, 1981). The analysis also reveals how the Internet is offering new possibilities regarding the constitution of an Islamic identity while additionally posing increasingly poignant questions about the role of Islamic religious leaders in this digital age.