 So happy to have everyone here for our last new voices in Global Security Seminar of the academic year. And we're definitely ending on a high. I'm super excited for this presentation. So we'll just give another minute or so, or rather 30 seconds or so for people to sign in and then we'll get started. Think we'll, yeah. I think we'll get started now. Okay, so welcome to again, the last seminar of Virtual Seminar rather of New Voices in Global Security. My name is Amanda Chisholm and I am the chair and organizer of this series. The series itself for those of you who aren't familiar aims to showcase the vibrant and diverse research of our PhD and early career researchers across the school of security studies. And we've been having this series for the past two years and really excited again for our last one of this term to have Aou Kuchesafahani. Sorry, Aou, I probably totally messed up your last name. We're so excited to have you here speaking about presenting your emerging research entitled Traces and Afterlives, Iranian Women's Digital Activism as narration of their struggle. So Aou is a PhD candidate of the Department of War Studies here at King's College and her research is concerned with feminist politics and social movements with a focus on Iran. Her thesis traces the trajectory of feminist activism in Iran in the 20th century to today with an emphasis on the role of social media in shaping modern feminist discourse. And she's previously held roles in digital communication in the public sector and in the third sector. We're so pleased to have you present today. So Aou is joined by Dr. Omar Al-Ghazi and he is going to act as her discussant. I've asked Aou to speak for about 20 to 25 minutes and in which case after that we'll have Dr. Al-Ghazi come and provide some commentary before we open it up the floor to you, the audience, for further questions. We've asked at this point, if you have any questions to please just put them in the question answer box. So Aou can read them and I can read them out loud to her as well. Well, without further ado, I'll hand the virtual floor over to you. You have some slides you want to share. Is that right? Thank you, Amanda. And yes, I will just share my screen one second. Is it working? Yeah, you still have it in. You don't have it in a presenter view just yet though. Yeah, I will have that right away. I'm so sorry about this. Can you take your time? Is this one, yes. Yes, perfect. Okay, great. So thank you for the really nice introduction, Amanda. And I'm really glad to be here today discussing one of the chapters of my pieces, which is about women's rights activism in Iran. I'm specifically looking at social media and how it is changing the landscape of the narrative on women's rights activism. So, sorry. Oh, gosh. So my framework in this chapter is basically a post-structuralist framework. I situate my research in post-structuralism's relational conception of identity, whereby an identity is given through reference to something it is not. It is precisely the contestation by competing narratives and competing actors under the same main identity that has historically caused And what I mean by that is the question of who is Iranian and what, I mean, who is an Iranian woman, more specifically, has always been contested. How do I mean this? The most stark contrast is the Islamic versus secular discourse on women, which is a point of contention ever since the revolution of 1979. And ever since then, the state narrative has focused on maintaining this us versus them approach. So I'm interested to find out why is this to exert influence and power. And then to inform my understanding of how power is maintained on social media, I use critical discourse analysis as I'm interested to know what power language holds specifically within technological advances like online media. So I will use critical discourse analysis, I mean, CDA from now on. So CDA focuses on integrating the online within the linguistic discourse research field. The online is an important environment that in discursive technology has its own native discourse which is referred to as online native discourse. The online native discourse represents any discourse created within a digital ecosystem. So I use this method to help navigate the premise upon which networks and power structures operate online. The machinations of social media, so to speak. It will provide answers as to why certain actors have wider reach and are more visible on social media platforms. So there is an argument. I'm also sorry to interrupt, but maybe you're shuffling papers next to the laptop because I can hear, like it's difficult to hear you. There's a lot of noise. So if you can please be careful with that. Thank you. Sorry about that. Yes. Okay. I'll be more mindful. Sorry. So Paavo, Marie Paavo, who's research focuses on discourse analysis online argues that to analyze native online discourse, we need to rethink the dualism of language and world by moving beyond this dualism and into a post-dualist approach in which linguistic material flows in continuum with the environment in which it is situated and not separately from it. This post-dualist viewpoint, she argues views the realm of the internet as a techno-linguistic ecosystem. So this framing allows me to analyze a series of techno-linguistic words as they relate to the online environment, such as hashtags, retweets, likes, and shares. Within the literature on Iranian feminism, little research has been done on the role of social media and such an analysis fills that gap. So I'm not only interested in finding out why women's rights activists use social media, but I'm also interested to find out how social media platforms affect the discourse by virtue of their functions. I need to shuffle the page. Sorry. That's okay. So an analysis of how they are used to form online discourse and how they yield the power to attract audiences online. Now for my methodology. I use a methodology of reading, which is a post-structuralist methodology, which allows for the observation and analysis of the different representations of the identities and their discourses. Therefore, I place my research within this feminist post-structuralist lens as it bases itself on the premise that identities are constructed and therefore how they are constructed and how they continue to shape discourse on Iranian women's rights are key concerns. Next, I use interviews with women identifying activists, journalists and lawyers within the diaspora to gather qualitative data on their use of social media and their experiences of online sexual harassment as women with large platforms. And the other thing I'm doing is I'm monitoring social media platforms, specifically Twitter and analyzing hashtags through tracing the trajectory of hashtags in the women's rights activism movement online, which has predominantly started from 2014. And I will explain why. Short key. So contextualizing the internet in Iran. Sorry. The internet was introduced to Iran in 1993. In 2019, the internet world stats reported that over 70% of Iran's population, so more than 62 million people are internet users. In a country with a population of 82 million. That's a very significant amount, obviously. So over 60% of Iran's 82 million people are also under 30 years old, which is striking. So early online dissent activities started in the 90s, in the late 90s with the reformists and the conservatives, these different political factions inside Iran. And they started using magazines and with the beginning, with the early onset of the internet blogs also became a very important tool for building on the discourse. And then, so with the onset of blogs, online journalism grew exponentially in response to the backlash against print publications being shut down by the state. And so recently there has been a rise in the use of social media websites, predominantly Instagram, because Instagram is yet to be blocked by Iran. And Twitter is used predominantly by journalists and it's also important for the transnational Iranian public sphere. And 40 million users are currently using Instagram, Twitter and messaging app Telegram. So what is the Iranian transnational public sphere? To go back to Habermas, the public sphere insinuates that there is a private sphere as well. And Habermas conceptualized public sphere as a bourgeois idea of a sphere that relies on the emergence of a mode of critical public discourse, representative of the public's interests within civil society and more importantly against the state. Berlant takes this point further, arguing that Habermas's definition of the public sphere depended on the expansion of class mixed semi-formal institutions like salons and cafes and print media and organizations. I need to change the page so I might just mute myself for a second or if someone can mute me, while I do that I'm very sorry for this. What, okay, yeah, sorry about this. So the private sphere until then relegated to the collective intimacy has now made it to a public sphere, arguably a democratic public sphere that has turned collective intimacy to a public and social ideal without which the public's role as political critic could not be established. That was a quote from Berlant. But I argue that the public sphere carries on into the online in conjunction with the private sphere, the collective intimacy so to speak. So thinking of how cafes and salons are places where people convene in small groups to discuss ideas and share experiences, I argue that these are replicated online when people meet under the auspices of collective identities, modes of organizing that make it easy to find like-minded people with similar interests. And techno-discursive terms such as the hashtag, the like button, the retweet options are also substantive elements. Therefore, in the same way that the online is a new realm upon which the public sphere has expanded, so too does the online actually rely on the intimate, the private sphere because of the affordances collective identities provide online. I define the Iranian transnational public sphere as an amalgamation of the public and private, a broad umbrella term encompassing all the different collective identities or intimate publics therein. So in other words, social media platforms as tools that convey messages is not enough to look at them as tools that convey messages. There is a neglect of the analysis of the content conveyed through the tools of social media. So that is what I'm trying to do using an analysis of discourses and iconographies forged by activists on social media. So it's also important for me to look more closely at what constitutes collective belonging and what the effect of it is. The effect of belonging are the relation between the attachment to the world and the feeling of belonging to the world. First, I believe that what is at stake here is the question of identity and how it is constructed online. In the process of forming to be part of the social, we lose control because we want to know people we do not know and create a world that we do not know yet. This explains why attachment is political as Berlin knows. Berlin's point on the political being a place of excitement, so belonging, and politics being a place where people are disappointed, hence underpins my assumption of a mutual existence of spheres of mobilization and contestation that run in parallel to each other. This assumption rests also on the evidence that social media is a space of contestation in addition to its enabling of connections to be made and collective identities that it births in common struggle of position and celebration of a topic. So who constitute the Iranian public sphere? So very broadly, I identify four broad categories of collective identities. So the first one is Persian speakers, predominantly residing in Iran. Switch the pages again on my notes. So by focusing on the different collective identities that form the Iranian transnational public sphere, I asked how, if at all, can they be interrelated? Collective actors are important figures shaping collective identities. There are four main strands that I have identified from my data collection, alongside my interview participants responses. So yes, the first is the collective identity of Iranians inside the country who write predominantly in Persian and who use social media in order to highlight what is going on. This is of course, as I said, a broad generalization, but it serves as a way to underpin the fact that while access to the internet is not completely free inside Iran, that users of social media from within Iran post content for a range of reasons, from economic to social to political reasons. But for the remit of this research, I focus on the political and the context in which the political is posted online. So political organizing in Iran, in a physical capacity is extremely dangerous as the example of the one million signatures campaign proves. The one million signatures campaign was a collective movement of Iranian activists and lawyers gathering signatures from all across Iran, from shops to cafes, to schools, to government agencies, to protect women's rights and block the detrimental family protection law from passing in 2008 under then president Ahmadinejad. While that movement was successful in blocking this law from passing, all of its members were imprisoned and many have fled as a result. Yes, so stifling online discourse, I mean, through national censorship and the creation of bots that aim to attack dissident voices online are some of the means the state resorts to to make the online space hostile. Collective actors are contesting each other while collective identities keep to themselves. I'm sorry, I realize I skipped a bit here. So this goes to the second category, the state and non-state actors. So because of the fact that organizing physically is dangerous inside Iran, the online is a new space with potential and that's why the state tries to create as much of a hostile environment online as it possibly can by creating these bots and by trying to distort any sign of unity. Yes, so now the non-state actors and then the non-state actors. I'm not saying they're the same. I'm saying how there are some connections between some influential Iranian figures and some non-state actors who conspire together at times. So the influential Iranian figures are those who have large platforms and who are predominantly resident in the diaspora and who by virtue of having large platforms are connected to the transnational public sphere through their engagement with diasporic media sources from conventional media to the online media. What do I mean by conventional media in the diaspora? I mean the television channels that have been created in the year spanning 2005 to 2011 which are very strong in upholding a space for the transnational Iranian public sphere to connect. These figures are regularly engaging with these television channels and some even have their own shows. I'm going to have to move the page again. The diasporic Iranians were able to identify with Iranians inside the country through their mutual viewing of these channels. I will name them. So Manoto, Iran International, BBC Persian and Voice of America Persian. These are really instrumental in creating these connections between Iranians inside the country and outside. These channels air from London and New York and Washington and show both entertainment and news programs in Persian and about Iran. There is an important link between these channels and the diasporic activists who, as I said, are given airtime on them. For instance, the first tweeter in the Iranian Me Too movement residing in the diaspora who revealed she was abused by a prominent artist had an exclusive telephone interview on Iran International who in picking up her story helped to amplify her story and crucially to put pressure on the perpetrator. I will discuss the Iranian Me Too movement later. So just to end on this note, why do I use the term strand? I suppose categories. I purposefully use the term strand because I aim to show that these strands can overlap and they are not entirely independent from each other. Even though the Iranian transnational public sphere can be right with division, contestation and co-optation, at the same time there are some moments where some of these strands connect. And especially evident in the connection as I said between exiled journalists and the conventional media but also exiled journalists with Iranian women inside the country, all of them from different political spheres, denouncing, for instance, the sexual harassment and rape as was the case at the early onset of the Me Too movement. So I'm also interested to find out why these moments of connection are fleeting. So I will try to find out which hashtags and why. Which hashtags am I looking at and why are the hashtags in particular? So to go back to techno-discursive terminology, hashtags in strict techno-discursive terms develop another meaning outside of their linguistic one. So they become hypertext, linking different texts written at different times. This form of transmission is unique to the online environment and thus I argue it can be effectively considered as a form of digital archiving of texts, images and videos across social media platforms. So the hashtags I'm looking at are My Stealthy Freedom because it is the first of a set of major hashtags that were specifically made to challenge the discriminatory law against women's compulsory hijab which started a thread of other hashtags notably the White Wednesdays and the My Camera is My Weapon. After that, because I follow a chronological order I have to say as well, I start with these three hashtags and then I move on to the Girls of Engelob Street. The Girls of Engelob Street is a grassroots movement that started in Iran also protesting against the compulsory hijab which arguably took influence from the My Stealthy Freedom campaign. And then finally I look at the emerging the fairly recent hashtag of Me Too Iran and in Persian it's called Manham which literally translates to Me Too. So these are just some examples of the content behind these hashtags. So why do I start by looking at the My Stealthy Freedom? It is because I look at hashtags that emerged in the women's rights discourse in the years following the Green Movement and uprising in 2009. They were created these hashtags were created by Masih Alinajad a former parliamentary journalist inside Iran. She first created the hashtag My Stealthy Freedom as a critique of the compulsory hijab once she was in exile after the uprisings. Her activism has then evolved from that hashtag and so she is a controversial figure who I will get to from Me Too Iran as well. So just to stick with the theme of hashtags why hashtags for now. In a critical discourse analysis a strong belief exists that we cannot simply extract the text from its online environment. It must be placed within its techno-discursive context. So the creation of the My Stealthy Freedom campaign was the first use of a hashtag to gather supporters and advocates of the Iranian women's rights movement under one place. And usually what started out as a collection of images to showcase the My Stealthy Freedom online turned into a campaign mobilized by and mobilizing people through their anger and these examples show that I hope at least but the anger is felt through the content being shared behind these hashtags. And also as picked up in the interviews my interview is responded unanimously that social media is a platform for anger. So anger, toxicity and slandering are the words that almost all of the interview is used to describe the online environment and they agreed these were serious issues in the context of Iranian women's rights online in particular. Yes, for the My Stealthy Freedom campaign to take off the ground. As evidenced above it was only after the discourse online became more one sided. What do I mean by that? With the evolution of her hashtag My Stealthy Freedom Alina Jad grew ever more hostile to the supposition that women have a right to choose what to wear. She started by campaigning for women to have the right to choose if they want to wear the hijab or not. And gradually it has shifted to a rather more of an Islamophobic discourse saying that the compulsory hijab is a reason for the Islamic Republic having to go once and for all. I mean the point here is that she is equating women's compulsory hijab to all of the repressions that the state forces on women in Iran. So how did the My Stealthy Freedom campaign take off? Alina Jad receives images and photos from women inside Iran as you can see on these images. They are sent to her and she posts them on her large platforms. So one of my interviewees who wish to remain anonymous told me that she receives regular direct messages on Twitter and Instagram from women inside Iran asking her for immigration advice as she is a lawyer. And she says that the movement on social media the movement of My Stealthy Freedom some of them some of these women have literally taken to the streets to remove their hijab as an act of defiance and others have challenged the system in other ways but a lot of them tell her that they were inspired through seeing things on social media and so in that sense Alina Jad received a lot of treatment over maybe the past five years and so taking to the streets to remove your hijab is a very dangerous act that is why they subsequently are forced to flee Iran because they face imprisonment. Alina Jad also receives a lot of trolling and harassment directed at her but so do other Iranian women who possess a large platform online and some have argued that there are still larger positives that outweigh the online abuse endured. As one interviewee who also wishes to remain anonymous and provide many ordinary Iranian women who come from quote-unquote less moneyed and less educated backgrounds to come out and demand change. So the argument here is that the power that social media gives to these ordinary women is the power of having their demands visibilized once the rejection of the Islamic Republic through that symbol so how do I mean they're visibilized once through the potential of having their images shared with a wider audience but also through the rejection of the compulsory hijab or the rejection of the Islamic Republic so I fear I have to go faster as I said Alina Jad is a controversial figure because of her narrow focus on creating a space of anger and toxicity online in the sense that she it's hard to see and listen these are images of the on the left you have a screenshot of just half a day on her Instagram and on the right just half a day on her Twitter she repeatedly posts the same video throughout the day and the main point of contention with her is that she's reaching out to people inside Iran to mobilize them to put their lives at more risk moving on to the girls of this movement which as I said is a grassroots movement that started in Iran as you can see on the left image the first woman to take a protest with putting her veil on a stick and holding it out her name was so this native movement was partly inspired by Alina Jad's campaign but also came as a result of many other socio-economic factors faced by Iranians who took to the streets to protest in November 2017 in what became the first upheaval that was blocked from social media as it marked the first time the state shut down the internet to block people from sharing and following life coverage of the protests so the image of this woman holding her white headscarf while standing on a plinth in the midst of the crowd was quickly filed under the hashtag girls of envelope street it sparked a movement of other Iranian women emulating where you can see on the image from this form of silent protest so in my interview with one of the girls of envelope street who also wishes to remain anonymous she describes the moment she saw the first woman to take up the silent stand and she quotes this image as being a powerful moment as if her silence was the scream of all of us she says that the act of standing on that plinth and holding the compulsory job in her hands was a cry for justice for acknowledgement that women have agency too so Rida Movahidi the top tweets with her name as a hashtag are of her sentencing short release and re-emprisonment and the last tweet was dated to the 2019 she has had no digital presence of her own her image the only trace of her circulating the online environment is shared by women's rights activists in the diaspora by western supporters and some policy makers alike so once policy makers and western supporters chime in the stories get sensationalized or not always but have a tendency to get sensationalized and they receive a lot more attention outside of the Iranian transnational sphere so there's an interesting link between policy makers within a more conservative right-wing leaning US think tanks that advocate for war with Iran and then pushing Iranian women's rights activism to fit within their discourse of lobbying and assertions and war on Iran which is detrimental to Iranian women so it's very annoying applying to the participants when I ask them whether social media makes women's rights activism harder there is no straight answer but a call to debate the pros and cons of using social media as one respondent says is required she also believes that one of the main challenges is the pressure on civil society inside Iran and the non-recognition of the right for women to organize another interviewee believes that social media can certainly help in the space that we become aware of stories so in that sense I wonder, I ask can it be said that social media by virtue of its technological format is shaping feminist discourse in Iran by allowing some forms of activism to take precedence over others so hello from hashtag in my research is the me too Iran or the manhem so in August 2020 there was a seismic shift in women's rights activism with the coming forward of many women to talk about their stories of sexual harassment in Iran the world went hashtag campaign of me too as women university students journalists and employees revealed their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of powerful Iranian men many of them well established figures within their fields with a near I would say untouchable status as a result of their high reaching connections but it started when a female university student in Iran broke her silence on Twitter calling out Kevin and mommy a bookshop owner in the university's vicinity for luring her back to his apartment and drugging and raping her soon after other women students came forward because the exact same thing had happened to them thus a chain of narratives of sexual assault and rape started emerging out of the bravery of one single person's tweet so the me too Iran hashtag campaign managed to open the lid on the toxic environment under which many women have suffered and had not dared to confront out of fear of the shame that could ensue from the public as well as a larger fear of suffering repercussions for having extra marital sex in a country that criminalizes this very act this was a first for speaking out in public on matters relating to sexual violence in Iran and among Iranians aside from or perhaps arguably the Islamic Republic's punitive stance on sexual relations outside of marriage it is important to also note that speaking publicly about rape and sexual assault is culturally also unheard of in Iran therefore it is not an overstatement to suggest that this movement has catapulted feminist discourse into educating debating and narrating on sexual violence with the first allegation against this bookshop owner others came forward online too making the case for his arrest clear by the end of 2020 police had announced that they had arrested him in what was a sign that they were compelled to act accordingly in order to ensure of both increasing some allegations against an army by former and current female students as well as the growing support and mobilization online for the victims who had spoken up about their ordeal the discourse had grown ever stronger with multiple voices coming out in support of the victims which was an unprecedented moment his imprisonment thus came as a very welcome sign of the government taking sexual violence seriously while feeling pressured by the transnational Iranian public sphere then in the diaspora this campaign continued when later in August 2020 Sara Omatali a former journalist turned educator broke her silence by releasing a series of tweets referred to obviously on Twitter as a thread recounting her ordeal at the hands of a prominent Iranian artist namely Aydin Ardashlou while she did not use the hashtags Me Too Iran or Manham initially her tweets sparked this movement in the diaspora as well the movement forced the taboo of sexual relations to be brought to the fore in this conservative society and as a result police temporarily suspended its law of citing extramarital sexual relations as a crime so that women could be encouraged to come forward and testify against their abusers since the first time a social media campaign was able to change policy in the conservative villages country even if it was only short lived it heralded a societal shift in speaking of sexual harassment more openly and that marks a turning point My concluding remarks in conclusion I what I tried to show in this presentation today is that online media remains a contested space where different collective actors within the Iranian transnational public sphere construct realities conspire against one another and co-opt narratives I would also like to point out how as a result of wanting to maintain a hold on what gets out of the country the Iranian government has proposed a drastic internet nationalization bill to further curb and restrict citizens access to the internet meanwhile there are regular internet shutdowns targeting local areas in protest to make it difficult for news of the uprisings to reach the outside in real time as is happening today as we speak in Huzestan So with this I just want to conclude saying how the internet and the online space is a crucial contested space where different forces battle to have the larger voice the louder voice Thank you Thank you so much for such a fascinating discussion. I love where your PhD is going and I particularly love the empirical richness of your work here So unfortunately we actually don't have any time for questions we're totally out of time. I didn't know if you had planned to speak for so long and I didn't want to interrupt you because you were I mean I was engrossed and I'm sure Omar was engrossed in conversation as well but this is something I think we definitely need to continue this conversation as your chapters progress Can you just give one minute to Omar if he has any comments that you want to make before we have to wrap up Yeah sure I'll be quick given the time constraints first Ahul I also wanted to congratulate you on your work and the way that it is developing it's very fascinating indeed and I want to say that your work is much more interesting and fascinating than you are presenting it in a way which is where I want to push you because you begin and conclude with the idea that the internet is a place of contestation site of political struggle but what you're presenting is so much richer than that because we know that the internet is such a space in various contexts around the world the challenge for you is to kind of think more specifically about Iranian digital culture particularly as it relates to activism which you know which in the empirical part you're already doing but you can present it and you know kind of speak back to theory in a much more enriching way as you explained in relation to the like when you talked about who the Iranian online public sphere is it's a very unique public sphere because of the role of the diaspora because of the interaction between the digital and mainstream sources and because of the geopolitical situation that makes any discussion on Iran kind of leak into the geopolitical imperial and so forth that makes feminist activism perhaps particularly challenging and its analysis so what I would suggest is kind of you try to avoid like talking about social media or the internet kind of in broad terms especially that actually your case studies are also in terms of like the historic context you're looking at case studies from different times and social media themselves have changed in that time and kind of anchored more concretely in the interviews that you're doing and perhaps like the idea of the hashtag is more important than like how the question is the question of how do your interviewees you know how do these activists conceive of the hashtag as an activist tool in relation to to feminist to feminist activism like you talked about disability you talked about perhaps the connection between across time and across like these different sectors within Iran outside Iran you talked about emotion and how like they associated with anger so perhaps there's space for a typology that you can bring forth in relation to how activists deal with the hashtag also you know like the visuals that that are attached to this hashtag like there it's a very particular also visual culture like the pictures that I've seen with the women you know like taking up space extending their arms the embodiment yeah like so so that is I think where like the kind of the really the value and the richness of what you're working on kind of comes across so I would kind of stay away from thinking in broad terms about the internet and social media and to theory like you know all these western theorists whether they're talking about social media or about the public sphere like they didn't have Iran you know in mind when they were theorizing so why should you or us like spend time kind of thinking about how they apply or not just you know speak back like yes okay you know Habermas and Berlin but the richness of what you're doing the contribution of you know what you're offering is actually much richer so I would start with like with an ethnographic sensibility in which you're doing but you know bring it out more as you as you as you go along I'll email you with some suggestions as well for kind of you know books that might be helpful for your project but yeah thank you for sharing your research with us thank you so much yes thank you very much thank you thank you so I just want to give the final floor to you if you want to say anything before unfortunately we have to end the discussion because there's another one coming up right away so we might be kicked off but do you have any final I'm very sorry that I went so much over time before but I think it was because I had to take time to change the pages I apologize for that so yes now thank you so much for your comments Omar and I think absolutely you're right I need to focus more on I suppose I don't like to use the word extracting but to figure out as you say why Iranian women's rights activists and journalists etc are using social media how they are using it more more specifically in terms of theorizing I think as I say also in the beginning as I said there is very little theorization within the Iranian context so I'm trying to find I guess what I'm trying to do is find a theory that I can anchor my research in but I definitely do take your point that I need to focus more on the actual research as in why Iranian women's activists are using social media and I hope to be able to expand that and this chapter that I presented is part of another I mean there are two big chapters within my thesis separated into two so I suppose what I need to do is then edit it better to really be able to place everything together but no thank you so much thank you Amanda as well for giving me the time to speak and yeah if anyone has any questions please feel free to email me I'm very sorry there was no time for Q&A don't worry about don't apologize I think just to quickly echo Omar's point too as you know as anyone who does research on communities that western theorists did not have in mind when they were you know they were building these concepts or whatnot I think it's I think Omar is right in thinking foreground your empirics right in a way that how does that experience you think about these concepts instead of foregrounding the concepts themselves and you might then adopt you know what some feminist like Christina Sylvester for example talks about the collage making where when she's trying to make sense of empirics she grabs concepts from here and there to help but it's all about prioritizing your fieldwork first right and how that helps you make make sense of what's going on so it might not just be Halberstam or it might not be Berlant itself but it might be a few different concepts but yeah that ethnographic sensibility that you know I think that's key and I felt like in your presentation that's where you came to your fore and that's where things got really interesting is when you were exploring the richness of this community and what you know what does that tell us about social organizing of political mobility about activism about social network so those are my two cents I'm abusing my position of chair to to say that to yes don't be afraid to you know to to prioritize your empirical research you have such an important thing to say or lots of things to say theory empirical otherwise so yeah so good luck and I can't wait to see how your research progresses can't wait to see this in print thank you so much thank you very much all right thank you everyone thank you Omar so much for your really thoughtful comments and for being a part of the series and thank you for your presentation and to you the audience for coming and listening in so I'm sure if you have any comments or questions like I said you can you can pop her an email or follow her on social media everyone have a great afternoon thanks for so much thanks so much for tuning in take care bye