Name: Digital Citizen Science and the Co-construction of Omani National and Cultural Identity
Start: 2025-11-11T17:00:00+01:00
Location: Kirchweg 33, 14129 Berlin, Germany

Lecture:
Digital Citizen Science and the Co-construction of Omani National and Cultural Identity: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis
by Dr. Najma Al Zidjaly Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
This presentation forms part of a larger longitudinal, ethnographic project spanning over two decades that examines the evolving relationship between human agency and emerging forms of creative media in the Arab world, with a particular focus on Oman. Positioned within the growing field of digital citizen science, the study conceptualizes Omani social media users as active contributors to collective knowledge production and cultural meaning-making. By tracing Omani digital practices from early online forums to contemporary platforms such as WhatsApp, X (Twitter), and Instagram, it explores how citizens collaboratively use new media platforms as cultural tools to construct, negotiate, and archive Omani national and cultural identity in the digital sphere. In contrast to much of the scholarship on Arab digital participation—which often centers on political activism—this study foregrounds the cultural and epistemic dimensions of digital participation in Oman, a society balancing rapid modernization with deeply rooted traditions. Drawing on the concepts of entextualization and reflexivity, and employing Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), the research demonstrates how ordinary users function as “citizen scientists” who document, analyze, and reinterpret social life through multimodal texts. Humor, affect, and irony—particularly as expressed in memes, stickers, reels, and commentaries—emerge as collaborative tools of inquiry and reflection, enabling users to perform subtle acts of critique, cultural renewal, and belonging. In other words, they emerge as central sites of cultural (re)production, allowing users to recontextualize shared narratives, articulate communal values through irony and play, and contest entrenched cultural stereotypes. Ultimately, the study contributes to digital ethnography and Arab media studies by i) revealing that Omani digital practices are layered and dynamic, shaped by the intersection of transnational (Arab), national (state-ascribed), and cultural (self-ascribed) identities, and ii) reframing everyday online practices as participatory forms of citizen science that both generate and disseminate local knowledge. It, therefore, argues that in Oman, identity negotiation is not merely a reactive or resistant act but a collective, reflexive process of reculturalization, through which citizens co-construct evolving understandings of what it means to be Omani in the digital age.

Najma Al Zidjaly is an Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Department of English and Translation at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. She is the author of Disability, Discourse and Technology: Agency and Inclusion in (Inter)action (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and editor of the special issue Society in Digital Contexts: New Modes of Identity and Community Construction (Multilingua, 2019). Her research has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Language in Society, Discourse & Society, Discourse, Context & Media, Visual Communication, Multimodal Communication, Pragmatics & Society, and Multilingua. Al Zidjaly’s work focuses on social media and Arab (particularly Omani) identity, with a special emphasis on representations with and without disability. She serves on the editorial boards of Discourse & Society and Multimodal Communication, and was formerly the Associate Editor (for the Arab World) of the IPrA Bibliography of Pragmatics Online (Antwerp, Belgium). She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Routledge’s book series The Arab Gulf States in Transition. In addition to her academic work, Al Zidjaly is a regular columnist for both Oman Observer and Muscat Daily.
The lecture is supported by Deutsche Oman Stiftung. It will take place at ZMO. No registration is required.
More info: https://www.zmo.de/en/events/digital-citizen-science-and-the-co-construction-of-omani-national-and-cultural-identity-a-multimodal-critical-discourse-analysis