Driving Change on Twitter: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of the Twitter Debates on the Saudi Ban on Women Driving

Lama Altoaimy
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Lama Altoaimy: Department of Linguistics, College of Languages, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, P.O. Box 84428, Saudi Arabia

Social Sciences, 2018, vol. 7, issue 5, 1-14

Abstract: This paper explores how Twitter has been used in the debate on women’s right to drive in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The overarching aim of this investigation is to explain how gender roles and the relationship between the genders are navigated in these debates. For Saudi Arabian women, social media platforms such as Twitter provide a unique space to express opinions and highlight areas of concern in a way that they are unable to in any other public sphere. The exploration of the debate on women’s right to drive in the KSA was achieved by collecting a body of tweets in Arabic addressing this topic from the last three months of 2015. Following a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach, this paper analyzes arguments by Twitter users discussing the KSA’s ban on women drivers, which may have contributed to women being granted the right to drive and also raised awareness of the restrictions imposed on women.

Keywords: Saudi women; Twitter; women driving; critical discourse studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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