Introduction
Our contemporary era is defined by rapid technological advancements that facilitate unprecedented population mobility and the transgression of ‘cultural, ideological, linguistic, and geopolitical borders’ (Duff Reference Duff2015). Within these shifting landscapes, technology and material entities transcend their status as passive tools, instead functioning as mediating agents that configure interactions across digital and physical domains (Jones Reference Jones2024). This agentive role of materiality—foregrounded by Latour (Reference Latour1996, Reference Latour2005) and extended through Sammut, Daanen, & Sartawi’s (Reference Sammut, Daanen and Sartawi2010) concept of interobjectivity—frames objects as bridges to shared cultural understandings that transcend individual perspectives. Such interplay is particularly salient in transnational movements, where physical and virtual environments emerge as critical ‘sites of engagement’ (Scollon Reference Scollon2001) for cultural exchange.
Driven by intensified space/time compression, these developments have fostered transnational spaces where diverse temporal and geographical contexts converge (Kearney Reference Kearney1995). Within these fluid boundaries, social actors strategically employ mediational means (Scollon Reference Scollon2001; Jones Reference Jones2016) to navigate ‘localized, physically fixed, and placed definitions’, thereby regulating identity through the influence of distant, virtual forces (Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah and Canagarajah2017:2). These cultural tools are not static; rather, their affordances emerge dialectically in relation to users’ goals and specific contexts (Hanks Reference Hanks1996 in Jones Reference Jones2016). Through such mediated actions, individuals draw upon entextualized traces of past discourse to reshape localized identity work, engendering hybrid forms of self-representation that challenge traditional boundaries.
This article examines the sociocultural implications of these evolving transnational practices for Iranians navigating identity across borders. We argue that digital environments empower Iranians to forge global networks while simultaneously participating in the endogenous (re)production of social orders (Garfinkel Reference Garfinkel1988) within Iran. Rather than positing an entirely new social order, we focus on how identity work within these online communities reconfigures state-imposed ideologies and cultivates new forms of sociality that resist hegemonic forces (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996; Ghorashi & Boersma Reference Ghorashi and Boersma2009). While previous research has documented Iranian migration patterns (Maloney Reference Maloney2015; Mirvahedi Reference Mirvahedi and Mirvahedi2019), the specific role of digital connectivity in mediating these interactions remains under-theorized. Addressing this gap, we integrate Bakhtin’s (Reference Bakhtin, Bakhtin and Holquist1981) chronotopes with nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004) to examine how historical bodies, interaction orders, and discourses in place converge within specific nexuses of practice. Methodologically grounded in digital ethnography (Skågeby Reference Skågeby and Daniel2011; Varis Reference Varis, Georgakopoulou and Spilioti2015), this study offers a nuanced account of how the convergence of digital and physical spaces reshapes sociocultural norms in an increasingly hyperconnected world.
Transnational Iranian mobility and digital connectivity
Iranians represent a paradigmatic case of globalized transnationalism. While historical records indicate that educational migration to Europe dates back to the early nineteenth century (Moradi Nejad & Pajoom Shariati Reference Moradi Nejad and Shariati1972), the 1979 Islamic Revolution served as the primary catalyst for large-scale emigration. Subsequent sociopolitical upheavals—including the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) and the recent economic hardships exacerbated by international sanctions—have further entrenched a global Iranian diaspora (Maloney Reference Maloney2015; Mirvahedi Reference Mirvahedi and Mirvahedi2019). Demographic statistics underscore the scale of this movement: the United States currently hosts the largest expatriate community, with over one million individuals of Iranian origin, while significant populations are established across Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, The Netherlands, and France (Honari, Bezouw, & Namazie Reference Honari, van Bezouw and Namazie2017).
Conversely, those remaining within Iran experience a distinct form of mobility mediated by digital access. Despite state-led efforts to mitigate ‘cultural invasion’ (tahajom-e farhangi), that is, the exposure of citizens to Western thoughts and values, and safeguard a specific Iranian-Islamic identity (Hayati & Mashhadi Reference Hayati and Mashhadi2010), the proliferation of satellite technology and internet access since the 1990s has enabled citizens to traverse ideological and geopolitical boundaries (Mirvahedi Reference Mirvahedi and Mirvahedi2019). With internet penetration now exceeding 91% among a population of over ninety million,Footnote 1 technological affordances facilitate the cultivation of translocal identities and social practices that are frequently circumscribed in the physical, offline public sphere.
This evolving social order is intrinsically linked to the ‘historical bodies’ of social actors (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004), as personal trajectories and sedimented histories determine the meanings derived from digital interactions. Within these transnational spaces, online platforms function as ‘sites of engagement’ (Scollon Reference Scollon2001) where Iranians continually express, negotiate, and contest identities in response to shifting national and cultural conditions. Examining Iranian transnationals’ identity work can illuminate the types of identities and social personae they desire, create, and navigate on online platforms, thereby demonstrating their integration into both their homeland and host societies. By focusing on the interplay of social action and historical experience (cf. Blommaert Reference Blommaert2005), we gain insight into the fluidity of boundaries that allow for the emergence of hybrid social personae. Despite the internet’s pervasive role in mediating Iranian sociality, sociolinguistic research investigating these specific digital-transnational nexuses remains limited, particularly regarding how localized identity work is reshaped by globalized, technologized interactions.
Nexus analysis and the chronotopic shaping of online identity
Bakhtin’s (Reference Bakhtin, Bakhtin and Holquist1981:84) foundational concept of the chronotope—the ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’—has been widely repurposed in sociolinguistics to elucidate how timespace configurations are interactionally achieved. As Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2020) contends, these configurations are ‘socioculturally recognizable’ semiotic constructs, deployed by participants to navigate specific contexts. In the digital realm, chronotopes function as more than just backdrops; they are sophisticated environments that nurture social interaction, facilitate knowledge exchange, and structure the performance of identity (Maly & Varis Reference Maly and Varis2016; Lyons & Tagg Reference Lyons and Tagg2019).
To theorize the production and sedimentation of these chronotopes and their meanings, this study adopts ‘nexus analysis’ (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004), a framework that foregrounds the situated and layered nature of social action. Nexus analysis ethnographically traces chronotopic emergence at sites of engagement (Scollon Reference Scollon2001; Norris & Jones Reference Norris and Jones2005)—intersections where trajectories of discourse, place, personhood, and materiality converge. As Jones (Reference Jones2016) posits, the utility of a semiotic tool—be it a digital platform or a bodily practice—resides not in its inherent properties but in its local adaptation to user goals. These sites function as dynamic interfaces where three key elements coalesce: discourses in place (technologies and ideologies), interaction orders (norms and social roles), and historical bodies (the sedimented histories of social actors). Within these nexuses, artifacts like hashtags or selfies become entextualized performances (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990) that render actors legible within wider chronotopic and moral expectations.
The analytical potency of this framework is well-documented in studies of multilingualism and transnationalism. Hult (Reference Hult2014), for instance, utilizes nexus analysis to reveal how ‘covert bilingualism’ facilitates the negotiation of insider/outsider positionalities. Similarly, Ou et al. (Reference Ou, Gu and Hult2023) examine how linguistic resources are mobilized to navigate ideological hierarchies in intercultural communication. These studies underscore the capacity of nexus analysis to trace how sociocultural histories and mediated practices converge—an orientation that informs our examination of chronotopic (re)production in Iranian digital interaction.
In this study, we view identity—or ‘personhood’ (Agha Reference Agha2003)—as emerging from typical interactions shaped by platform affordances and embodied histories. Drawing on Goffman’s (Reference Goffman1963) notion of the ‘watch’, Jones (Reference Jones2016, Reference Jones2024) illustrates how digital surveillance structures visibility as a ‘spectacle’ subject to moral evaluation. Here, Norris’s (Reference Norris2004) concept of ‘frozen actions’ is particularly salient; discursive gestures are inscribed into digital artifacts (archived tweets or videos) that carry the sediment of prior practices. These traces allow individuals to reanimate histories of resistance or piety in new contexts. For example, a ‘hijab selfie’ may activate historical struggles over state surveillance while simultaneously engaging new, global ideological frames. Such expressions are hybrid and agentive, emerging at the intersection of the immediate digital environment and broader macroscopic discourses of migration and religious ideology.
Crucially, nexus analysis provides a motive-based lens on these mediated actions. A single performance—such as the aforementioned selfie—may be interpreted through divergent evaluative frames (e.g. agency vs. modesty) shaped by shifting ideological alignments across time and platform. This aligns with sociolinguistic approaches to globalization that emphasize how chronotopic conditions regulate access to meaning-making resources (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010). Chronotopes are not neutral; they are ‘peopled by certain social types’ (Agha Reference Agha2007:321) and reflect the microhegemonies that determine who is heard or legitimized (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020). This interplay is mediated by indexicality—the process by which mobile signs point to wider sociocultural formations (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2005; Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah and Canagarajah2017). Through these mobile signs, social actors assemble hybrid communicative repertoires to negotiate layered scales of legitimacy (Karimzad Reference Karimzad2021).
This means rather than assuming that Islamic-Iranian identity is a stable, institutionalized category, we approach it as a relational phenomenon emerging in local interaction (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005). This necessitates a redefinition of context from a static category to an ‘IDEOLOGICAL and a MORAL a priori’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2017:95). This perspective resonates with Scollon’s (Reference Scollon2008) ‘discourse itineraries’, where the relationship between text and context is continuously mediated by resemiotization across social spaces. Communication in these local contexts is ‘semiotically layered’ and polycentric (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005), reflecting how identities are informed by translocal discourses traversing geopolitical borders—a process Appadurai (Reference Appadurai1996) terms the ‘production of locality’.
Ultimately, these interactions are best understood as semiotic ecosystems (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004). Identities are formed not by isolated communicative acts, but by their interaction within constellations of global political Discourses (Gee Reference Gee2014), platform governance, and sedimented norms. Viewing context as a multilayered organization of chronotopes—where microscopic interactions intersect with macroscopic social change—reveals how local and global resources are blended into ‘indexically super-rich stuff’ (Blommaert & De Fina Reference Blommaert, De Fina, Fina, Ikizoglu and Wegner2017:10). In this way, identity work among transnational Iranians emerges through the complex entanglement of digital affordances, historical bodies, and shifting chronotopic hegemonies.
Methodology
The methodological challenges inherent in digital ethnography are multifaceted, necessitating a departure from the traditional parameters of sociolinguistic inquiry. Unlike classical ethnography, where research sites, participants, and data boundaries are relatively stable, digital environments frequently involve no physical co-presence between the researcher and the researched. Instead, a shared co-presence is forged within ‘virtual’ spaces of indeterminate scale and often anonymous participation (Blommaert & De Fina Reference Blommaert, De Fina, Fina, Ikizoglu and Wegner2017). The transient nature of these ‘light communities’ (Blommaert & Varis Reference Blommaert and Varis2015) often precludes the longitudinal tracking of individual actors typical of classical anthropology. Consequently, the analytical focus shifts from observing individuals over time to the investigation of digital phenomena as Discourses manifested through situated social practices (Gee Reference Gee2014). This digital landscape constitutes a complex site of engagement where disparate social practices momentarily converge, further complicated by the increasingly porous boundaries between online and offline spheres (Bolander & Locher Reference Bolander and Locher2014).
Within these spaces, the role of the participant has undergone a fundamental evolution, necessitating a move away from static binary roles. Individuals do not merely consume content but actively produce it, effectively blurring the traditional distinction between producer and consumer. These ‘prosumers’ (Leppänen, Kytölä, Jousmäki, Peuronen, & Westinen Reference Leppänen, Kytölä, Jousmäki, Peuronen, Seargeant and Tagg2014) engage in cultural, economic, and civic practices that redefine the boundaries of interaction in the digital realm (Androutsopoulos Reference Androutsopoulos and Androutsopoulos2014). A pivotal practice in this context is entextualisation, wherein semiotic resources are extracted from their original environments and recontextualised within new communicative frameworks (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990; Blommaert Reference Blommaert2005). Through this active engagement, prosumers exemplify a form of transformative user agency, influencing public discourse and facilitating direct communication with stakeholders that were previously inaccessible. This process underscores how prosumers repurpose content to negotiate new meanings and influence the broader sociopolitical landscape. Social media platforms thus serve as ‘transnational networking public spaces’ (Esposito & Sinatora Reference Esposito and Sinatora2021:505), offering a unique vantage point for observing these evolving roles within a global context.
Our methodological framework is grounded in ‘thick participation’ (Sarangi Reference Sarangi2007), an immersive involvement that enables the researcher to uncover the values and meanings integral to community practices. We situate our researcher roles within a ‘zone of identification’, participating both analytically and reflexively in the very practices we aim to understand. This reflexive stance acknowledges that the researcher is not an objective observer but an active participant in the resemiotisation of the data. This approach is further enhanced by integrating social semiotic perspectives and employing analytical tools from mediated discourse analysis (MDA) and multimodal mediation (Scollon Reference Scollon2001; Norris & Jones Reference Norris and Jones2005).
To operationalize this, we draw on Heller, Pietikäinen, & Pujolar (Reference Heller, Pietikäinen and Pujolar2018:47), conceptualizing digital sites as ‘entry points into a web of … spatially and temporally situated experiences, connections and relations’. This study explicitly integrates nexus analysis and chronotopes as its primary methodological tools. This framework systematically investigates how social actions and identities are mediated across digital spaces, tracing the intersection of virtual and offline trajectories. Central to this is the process of circumferencing (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004), where the analytical scope is expanded beyond isolated events to encompass the historical, material, and interactional cycles that shape and are shaped by those events. By expanding the circumference of the analysis, we can link microscopic interactional shifts to macroscopic sociocultural changes.
To further refine this analysis, we examine semiotic meaning through the dual layers proposed by Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2015): the denotational and the indexical. The denotational layer reflects the conventional linguistic and semiotic dimensions—language, appearance, and behaviour—while the indexical layer draws from the broader sociocultural, political, historical, and economic contexts. This dual-layered approach is particularly significant for identity negotiation, as it reveals how identities are situated within wider societal frameworks. Individuals continuously reshape their identities through multimodal interactions where these layers intersect, often employing ‘frozen actions’ (Norris Reference Norris2004) inscribed in digital artifacts to reanimate past meanings. By adopting this nexus-oriented approach, we foreground not only the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of interaction but also the motive (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004), linking digital affordances such as anonymity and asynchronicity to broader macroscopic sociocultural processes. Ultimately, this allows for an exploration of how ideas, identities, and social practices are negotiated in multimodal and dynamic ways within the specific constraints and possibilities of digital media.
The data
The empirical data for this study are derived from an extensive investigation into the sociocultural behaviors and identity performances of Iranians on mobile live-streaming platforms. These applications facilitate synchronous, public broadcasts where hosts initiate audio-video sessions accessible to a global audience without prior authorization. Within this digital architecture, participants can engage peripherally via text-based chat or transition to active ‘on-screen’ participation through the host’s mediation. To ensure the ontological security and privacy of the Iranian users navigating these often politically sensitive spaces, the specific identity of the application has been anonymized.
In alignment with the digital ethnographic principles articulated above, our approach prioritizes the observation of sociocultural phenomena over the longitudinal tracking of individual users—a strategy necessitated by the inherent transience of digital ‘prosumption’. Each recorded interaction is conceptualized as a site of engagement (Scollon Reference Scollon2001): a spatio-temporal window where disparate social practices converge in real time, rendering meaningful social action available for micro-analysis.
The primary data set comprises a twenty-minute continuous interaction involving a young female participant in Iran—appearing to be a minor—and two male Iranian expatriates residing in the United Kingdom and another European nation, respectively. Adopting the role of ‘unratified participants’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1981), we utilized screen-recording software to capture the multi-modal nuances of the exchange, which was subsequently transcribed verbatim. As researchers of Iranian heritage with nearly two decades of transnational experience, we established a zone of identification through our linguistic and cultural reflexivity. This dual positionality allowed us to navigate the data with both the critical distance of the etic observer and the nuanced, emic insight of the cultural insider.
As noted above, our interpretive process utilized circumferencing (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004) to expand the analytical lens, accounting for the macro-sociological, cultural, and geopolitical discourses that both scaffold and are reshaped by the interaction. The reconstruction of the participants’ historical bodies was triangulated through three distinct evidentiary streams: (i) explicit self-positionings and members’ generalizations within the interaction, (ii) observable, neutral patterns of interactional behavior, and (iii) iterative engagement with the participants’ broader digital activity cycles (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004:158). Rather than claiming access to exhaustive life histories, we trace how specific ideological formations become sedimented and reanimated within the site of engagement. Our own historical bodies are treated not as a source of bias to be eliminated, but as a situated interaction order through which the analysis is reflexively produced.
Methodologically, we have elected to analyze a single, extended excerpt rather than a fragmented corpus of unrelated clips. This approach facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the interactional trajectory, allowing for a longitudinal exploration of how identities and moral behaviors unfold (Androutsopoulos Reference Androutsopoulos, Cotter and Perrin2017). Such an ‘unfolding’ reveals the layered and often competing motives embedded in the participants’ discourse, illustrating how social actors position themselves relative to hegemonic ideologies. This strategy aligns with Sarangi’s (Reference Sarangi2007) advocacy for ‘thick participation’, wherein immersion allows the researcher to identify the profound significance of community practices. By focusing on the depth and continuity of this specific nexus, we aim to derive generalizable insights into the wider dynamics of digital interaction within the Iranian diaspora (Izadi & Dryden Reference Izadi and Dryden2024). For clarity of analysis, the excerpt is presented below in four sequential segments, preserving the interactional ambiance and context.
Ethical considerations and the ‘consent paradox’
A significant ethical challenge in digital ethnography of ‘light communities’ (Blommaert & Varis Reference Blommaert and Varis2015) is the impossibility of obtaining traditional, synchronous informed consent from participants who traverse fluid digital spaces in real-time. In this study, we adopt a process-oriented ethical framework (Guillemin & Gillam Reference Guillemin and Gillam2004) that prioritizes the protection of participants over the formalistic acquisition of signatures. Following the ethical guidelines for internet-mediated research (BPS 2021), we argue that the ‘site of engagement’ on this live-streaming platform functions as a publicly accessible space where users possess a ‘diminished expectation of privacy’ (Nissenbaum Reference Nissenbaum2010) due to the synchronous, unmoderated, and broadcast-oriented nature of the medium.
To mitigate potential harm in the absence of direct consent, we employed ‘heavy’ anonymization and ‘fabrication’ techniques (Markham Reference Markham2012). This involved not only withholding the application’s name but also scrubbing all ‘traceable’ metadata, such as specific usernames, profile descriptions, and hyper-localizing details that could lead to ‘reverse-searching’ (Zimmer Reference Zimmer2010). Furthermore, our role as ‘unratified participants’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1981) was chosen to maintain the naturalistic integrity of the interaction; interrupting the flow of a twenty-minute transnational exchange to seek consent from transient users would have constituted an ethical breach of the participants’ social space and likely triggered ‘observer’s paradox’ issues. By focusing the analysis on sociocultural phenomena and discursive patterns rather than individual personas, we align with the de-identification standards necessary for the ethical study of marginalized or politically sensitive transnational populations.
Data analysis
Excerpt (1): Chronotopes of temporal and cultural comparison
The interaction under examination centres on a Thursday night exchange among three participants—namely Kambiz (in the UK), Ahmad (in another European country), and Anita (in Iran)—and unfolds as a site of moral regulation and identity negotiation within a diasporic digital setting. What appears to be a casual comparison between Iranian and European weekends quickly transforms into a complex, layered chronotopic and ideological struggle, demonstrating how timespace configurations become saturated with normative expectations, moral hierarchies, and cultural affiliations. Central to this is the phrase ‘Friday night’, which undergoes multiple rounds of resemiotisation as the participants position themselves and one another across intersecting ideological frames.
(1)Footnote 2
Kambiz’s initial comparison (“tomorrow is Friday in Iran, and it is off”) in line 1 does more than establish a factual distinction. It activates a chronotope of cultural productivity, situating the Iranian Friday within a spatiotemporal frame that values discipline, limitation, and moral order. By invoking “we” versus “you”, Kambiz indexes two distinct moral temporal regimes: the Iranian single day of rest framed as virtuous constraint, and the European weekend as indulgent or excessive. This move is both referential and indexical, drawing on circulating discourses of Iranian industriousness and Western leisure, and it sets the stage for a normative evaluation of youth behaviour within diasporic space. Anita’s response (“Friday night, Friday night”) in line 2 initiates a clear chronotopic shift, moving the interaction from calendar time to cultural time. Her repetition signals a reorientation toward youth culture, nightlife, and digital self-performance. This moment performs a resemiotisation of “Friday” from a temporal designation into a symbol of freedom, play, and social possibility. It is through this uptake that a new chronotope emerges, one shaped by media saturated representations of “Friday night” as a time of social interaction, romance, and perhaps flirtation. Anita’s turn here draws on discourses in place that circulate globally across digital platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Telegram, where young people curate identities through posts and performances embedded in recognisable temporal frames. In this way, her utterance operates as a discursive pivot, re-textualising Kambiz’s moralising gesture into a playful and agentive self-positioning.
Kambiz’s immediate response (“I said Friday. What did I say?”) in line 3 functions interactionally as a denial and disalignment, attempting to reassert the original chronotopic frame of industrious morality. His affective tone signals a moment of ideological discomfort, a recognition that the interaction has veered into territory he cannot accept. The interaction order here begins to shift: what initially appears as a relatively symmetrical exchange among the three peers gradually morphs into a moral hierarchy. Kambiz’s corrective stance and age-based evaluation reposition him as an authoritative figure, while Anita becomes the object of scrutiny. This is cemented by Kambiz’s next move (“you are not eighteen”, line 5), a rhetorical question designed to re-entextualise Anita’s utterance as inappropriate given her presumed age. This strategic invocation of youth is not neutral, but a key mechanism through which chronotopic personhood is reimposed. To fully understand this move, we need to engage in Scollon & Scollon’s (Reference Scollon and Scollon2004:10) circumferencing, the analytical act of expanding the frame of analysis to consider how this utterance draws upon broader historical trajectories of gendered moral surveillance, age-based authority, and diasporic anxieties about youth behaviour. Through this wider lens, Kambiz’s restriction of Anita’s participation is not just a momentary judgment but part of broader ideological formations that structure participation rights in diasporic interaction, particularly through age hierarchy, gendered moral surveillance, and the regulation of youth behaviour across transnational space. What we see here is a classic resemiotisation of agency into risk, the same utterance “Friday night” now transformed from playful expression to evidence of moral failure through a shift in uptake. This shift demonstrates how discursive meaning is not fixed but contingent upon the social positioning of speakers and the ideological frames activated through interaction.
This process of entextualisation and resemiotisation plays out across three intertwined layers of nexus analysis. First, the discourses in place: the interaction mobilises ideological narratives about gender, youth, piety, diaspora, and leisure, as well as technological and infrastructural referents. Kambiz’s mention of ‘free internet’ on Fridays is particularly telling. It indexes state-controlled digital access in Iran, turning Friday into a site not only of rest but of potential moral vulnerability, a time when young people are most digitally connected and thus, from his view, most in need of regulation. This infrastructural discourse redefines temporality itself, anchoring it in technological availability and expanding the chronotope to include digital conditions of communication. Second, the interaction order reflects a dynamic hierarchy being negotiated in real time. Kambiz’s self-positioning draws on his perceived role as elder, male, and diasporically experienced, evident in the appeal to shared memory “as we all know” (line 5) and his critique of youth behaviour. Ahmad, meanwhile, participates minimally, offering silent or brief affirmations that align him with Kambiz’s stance. This discursive alignment contributes to what Scollon & Scollon (Reference Scollon and Scollon2003) describe as a watch frame: Anita becomes the object of scrutiny, her utterances read not as playful banter but as public performances to be evaluated. The interaction thus shifts from a friendly, shared space to watch a moral stage on which normative assessments are made.
Third, historical bodies play a constitutive role in shaping both the uptake of utterances and their moral interpretation. Kambiz’s positioning in the interaction is animated by an embodied history grounded in Iranian social and cultural norms (Anthias Reference Anthias2002), particularly those that privilege adult authority, moral surveillance, and disciplinary regulation of youth behaviour. His repeated emphasis on Anita’s age (“you are not eighteen yet”, line 5, and “you look younger than fourteen”, line 7) reflects not only his current stance, but also the sediment of earlier discursive practices that Norris (Reference Norris2004) calls ‘frozen actions’ that have been inscribed into his habitual modes of evaluation. These ‘frozen actions’ manifest as normative judgments that are reanimated in the present interaction, shaping the historical body he brings into this digital site of engagement. This body is formed by post-revolutionary discourses of modesty, gender segregation, and the moral monitoring of youth, particularly women. These evaluations are not simply personal opinions but reflect sedimented habits of perception and judgment, historically tied to Iranian ideologies of respectability.
By contrast, Anita’s utterances, specifically her playful repetition of “Friday night, Friday night”, emerge from a different historical body, one more attuned to hybrid digital identities and translocal youth chronotopes. Her rhythm and tone convey familiarity with the affordances and performativity of online spaces, where self-presentation is often playful, flirtatious, and socially situated within globalised youth culture. Rather than a passive recipient of moral correction, Anita momentarily reconfigures the interactional frame by re-entextualising “Friday night” as a site of enjoyment and social agency. Her embodied experience, shaped by growing up in a digital Iran where temporal patterns of internet access and online expression are deeply interwoven, contrasts sharply with Kambiz’s more disciplinary and surveillant historical orientation. These conflicting historical bodies are not merely background influences but actively shape the meaning making in the interaction and constitute the ground upon which the chronotopic struggle over normativity, leisure, and youth agency unfolds.
In sum, this excerpt offers a clear instantiation of a nexus of practice, where interactional moves are saturated with historical, ideological, and technological conditions. The analysis shows how discourses in place, interaction orders, and historical bodies interact dynamically to produce meaning. The social action at the heart of this exchange is not merely critique, but a moral recalibration of youth agency in digital diasporic space, enacted through chronotopic struggle and resemiotised uptake. Nexus analysis allows us to understand not only what is said, but how it is interactionally realised as part of a larger ideological and semiotic struggle, one that is fundamentally about who has the right to speak, to joke, to be seen, and to be judged in transnational online spaces.
Excerpt (2): Resemiotising age and realigning authority in a diasporic nexus of practice
Building on the earlier exchange, which foregrounds chronotopic struggles over morality and youth identity, this next excerpt focuses on how age and agency are negotiated through educational norms. This interaction unfolds as a site of moral calibration, where diasporic adult figures attempt to determine the legitimacy of Anita’s participation in playful, digitally mediated discourse through age-based scrutiny. At stake is the social action of negotiating adult status and moral legitimacy in a diasporic, digitally mediated environment. This negotiation is accomplished through discursive circumferencing, mediated actions, chronotopic shifts, and the circulation of ideological discourses, ultimately constructing a moral and temporal frame for identity.
The exchange begins with Kambiz’s assertion that Anita “should have a book” in her hand in line 11. This utterance performs circumferencing by setting the limits of acceptable behaviour for a teenage girl, embedding her within a moral chronotope of educational discipline. It also implicitly references broader diasporic anxieties, particularly the legal framework surrounding minors in the UK, which are part of Kambiz’s historical body. His self-censorship (“what shall I say? Never mind”) in line 11 is a moment of motive suppression. It suggests both a recognition of past behaviours that may not align with current moral expectations and a reluctance to express them within this social configuration. This moment of suspended narrative signals a disjuncture between past and present selves, and between backstage experiences and front stage performances (Goffman Reference Goffman1959). Kambiz’s reluctance to disclose his own teenage behaviours (“what shall I say? Never mind”) is not simply a gesture of politeness but an instance of motive suppression. His self-censorship reflects an awareness of the performative demands of the current interaction order, where diasporic adults are expected to model propriety in the presence of younger interlocutors, especially in publicly visible digital spaces. What is withheld here is just as meaningful as what is spoken. Anita’s embodied response (raising her Arabic textbook to the camera) is a strategically mediated action that mobilises multiple semiotic resources. The textbook itself becomes a mediational means, not only as an educational artefact but as a symbolic assertion of moral alignment. The book here also functions as a ‘frozen action’ (Norris Reference Norris2004), a sedimented semiotic resource embodying habitual academic discipline and normative expectations, which Anita strategically employs to respond to Kambiz’s moral imperative. Through this act, Anita resemiotises Kambiz’s moral imperative into a visual frame that satisfies his expectations. The book thus operates simultaneously as a legitimating prop, an index of academic engagement, and a performative response that reclaims agency within a constrained interaction order. Its visual presence reinforces her alignment with the educational chronotope while also transforming the moral gaze into a moment of playful subversion. Her gesture entextualises Kambiz’s disciplinary discourse into a form legible within the digital interaction order. The webcam, as a mediational means, enables a hybrid action that combines gesture, visual display, and spatial co-presence. It allows Anita to present a self that is both compliant and agentive. This use of the webcam transforms the interaction order: authority becomes negotiable, and scrutiny is turned into performance. Rather than simply transmitting information, the digital medium reshapes how agency is distributed within the semiotic ecosystem of the exchange. This mediated gesture also reconfigures the interaction order. What began as a vertically structured, intergenerational judgment, where Kambiz positioned himself as a moral evaluator, gradually transforms into a more distributed and negotiated alignment. Anita’s strategic use of digital tools and semiotic resources invites a realignment of roles: Kambiz and Ahmad shift from enforcers of propriety to co-participants in playful recognition of Anita’s agency. This moment reflects not a collapse of hierarchy, but a recalibration, where authority is softened and shared through mediated affirmation.
The sustained questioning about her school grade and age reveals the participants’ efforts to verify Anita’s place within normative chronotopic boundaries. As Kambiz and Ahmad attempt to calculate her age through grade-level references, they draw upon institutional discourses familiar from their own (educational) historical bodies. Their repeated questions about the age of eleventh graders in lines 18–19 are not simply factual queries, but part of a motive analysis through which Anita’s actions are morally assessed. Their role as evaluators is not fixed but rather it shifts dynamically as new information emerges and alignments are recalibrated. Once Anita declares “eighteen, eighteen” in line 20, a significant transformation occurs in the interaction order. The conversation realigns from one of suspicion to one of inclusion. Kambiz’s celebratory refrain (“no problem”, line 21, “cheers, cheers, cheers”, line 23) resemiotises Anita’s age from a sign of minor status and restriction into a sign of legal adulthood and inclusion in adult practices. This discursive move draws on an already enregistered diasporic register of adulthood, where turning eighteen is conventionally associated with autonomy, legal recognition, and access to adult practices such as drinking and dating, as imagined within Western diasporic contexts.
These utterances are not incidental; they trace a discourse itinerary. The celebratory toast “cheers” (line 23) indexes Western rites of passage and circulates as part of a diasporic register of adulthood. It is an example of enregisterment (Agha Reference Agha2007), where specific linguistic and embodied forms (drinking, laughter, verbal affirmation) are recognisable as part of a shared diasporic repertoire. The toast operates as both symbolic and pragmatic closure to the earlier moral tension. It also reflects the way historical bodies (Kambiz and Ahmad’s diasporic experiences of Western adulthood) shape what counts as legitimate maturity. The interaction order thus evolves: Kambiz and Ahmad begin as disciplinary figures engaging in moral evaluation, while Anita is cast in the role of the evaluated minor. Yet through her mediated action and age declaration, the roles shift. Ahmad’s affirmation (“confirmed then”, line 22) solidifies the new alignment. The trio now performs a shared social script of diasporic adult inclusion. The digital affordances of the platform (e.g. video, voice, and chat) mediate these shifts, allowing for real-time resemiotisation and role recalibration. These dynamic changes are situated within a semiotic ecosystem where each participant’s historical body plays a central role. Kambiz’s internalised moral codes, shaped by both Iranian norms and diasporic legal contexts, emerge in his utterances and hesitations. Ahmad’s behaviour (supportive but cautious) reflects a form of diasporic masculinity that aligns with disciplinary norms while avoiding overt confrontation. Anita’s historical body, by contrast, is characterised by digital fluency, familiarity with multiple chronotopes (studenthood, leisure, adult inclusion), and a keen awareness of how to perform legitimacy within this nexus of practice.
In sum, this excerpt illustrates a complex and fluid negotiation of age, morality, and legitimacy in a diasporic digital setting. The analysis traces how discourses in place (education, legality, adulthood), interaction orders (discipline, alignment, celebration), and historical bodies (diasporic memory, digital habitus) intersect within a digitally mediated site of engagement. Through circumferencing, motive analysis, and the use of mediational means, the participants co-construct a shared moral frame that legitimates Anita’s participation in a transnational space. The chronotopic tension between Iranian studenthood and Western adulthood is not only articulated but interactionally resolved through resemiotisation and realigned interaction orders. Nexus analysis enables us to track these shifts with precision, demonstrating how agency and identity are always embedded in layered histories, ideological currents, and material-semiotic infrastructures.
Excerpt (3): Adulthood as a nexus of practice: Chronotopic struggle and semiotic realignment in digital diasporic space
Building on the negotiation of age and legitimacy in the previous excerpt, excerpt (3) constitutes a site of engagement where chronotopic imaginaries of adulthood and autonomy are actively negotiated across conflicting cultural frameworks. The main social action under negotiation is Anita’s moral and cultural positioning within a transnational nexus of practice, marked by divergent expectations around maturity, control, and freedom. The conversation unfolds within a semiotic ecosystem in which multiple discourse cycles (e.g. law, family control, romantic relationships, education, taxation) intersect with the mediational affordances of the digital platform to shape how autonomy is recognised and legitimised.
The interaction order here initially positions Kambiz and Ahmad as diasporic adults evaluating Anita’s eligibility for adult status, invoking both legal and cultural criteria for autonomy. Kambiz’s narration of UK adulthood (lines 29–31) is not simply anecdotal but functions as a motive statement designed to legitimise a shift in interaction order namely from guarded questioning to normative inclusion. His list of adult activities (dating, drinking, smoking, renting a flat) resemiotises adulthood into a bundle of legally sanctioned freedoms, linked to institutional discourses and embodied in the ID card as a material-semiotic artefact. This ID becomes a mediational means through which access to adult chronotopes is regulated in the UK. In doing so, Kambiz foregrounds a discourse in place: the UK legal system as a context that structures the conditions of moral personhood. Ahmad’s minimal but affirming response (“Yes, when you are 18 you decide for yourself”, line 30) reinforces the shift, functioning as a second pair in the interaction order that aligns with Kambiz’s moral framing. Yet this constructed chronotope of liberal adulthood is immediately troubled by Anita’s counter-chronotope (line 36), which references familial surveillance in Iran: “if we mention boyfriends, they suffocate [kill] you”. Her exaggerated gesture of being “killed” indexes a gendered moral discourse embedded in the Iranian family institution. This moment introduces a disjunctive chronotope where legality and adulthood are not synchronised, and where the historical body (Anita’s lived experience as a female adolescent in Iran) challenges the legitimacy of legal majority as the sole marker of agency.
Anita’s response thus interrupts the trajectory of Kambiz’s motive analysis, which had attempted to frame age eighteen as a threshold for normative freedom. Her resemiotisation of that threshold invokes not autonomy but control, illustrating how historical bodies inflect what counts as actionable maturity. In this moment, the interaction order shifts again: Anita temporarily assumes the role of authoritative witness to Iranian constraints, while Kambiz’s narrative is momentarily decentred. Kambiz’s utterance in line 37 (“I wish this girl was telling the truth… everyone single rents their own flat, or as soon as one turns 15 or 16”) attempts to reclaim epistemic authority through diasporic distance and temporal contrast (“I’ve been away from Iran for 10 years now”). His perspective relies on the circulation of discourses of decline (“everything is ruined”), contrasting present-day Iran with an earlier, idealised past.
Here, we see multiple chronotopes overlapping: Kambiz’s UK-based adult autonomy, Anita’s Iran-based familial constraint, and a nostalgic temporality of cultural erosion. These conflicting discourses are negotiated through the platform’s mediational affordances (video, turn-taking, gestural visibility), enabling participants to resemiotise claims to legitimacy in real time. The digital site of engagement allows these conflicting chronotopes to be juxtaposed and evaluated within a single interaction order.
Importantly, Anita’s expression of envy (“Lucky you”, line 40) and Kambiz’s retort (“What lucky us?”, line 41) open another discursive loop. Her utterance positions the diasporic context as desirable, reinscribing an aspirational chronotope that reemerges in diasporic youth discourses. However, Kambiz destabilises this idealisation by introducing the discourse of taxation (line 43), reframing autonomy as economically constrained. His elaboration of paying tax on everything, even Wi-Fi introduces a new discourse in place, for example, the bureaucratic structures of state governance, and links it to embodied experience (the cost of eating, living, and communicating). This shift in discourse reconfigures the moral economy of adulthood: from individual freedom to civic obligation. Simultaneously, Kambiz links these socioeconomic discourses with institutional education, comparing the UK and Iranian grading systems. The school grade becomes a mediational means through which evaluative chronotopes are constructed, further emphasising the institutional framing of subjecthood. The conversation closes with a question about Anita’s physical location (“Are you home now?”, line 43), which anchors the prior abstract discourses in the material present. This question functions as a moment of circumferencing: a subtle return to the interactional structure that regulates what kind of participation is acceptable for someone in Anita’s position. In sum, this excerpt reveals how adulthood is not a fixed legal status but a culturally and discursively mediated position, emergent at the intersection of institutional discourses, gendered norms, digital platforms, and transnational histories.
Excerpt (4): Resemiotising age and legitimacy: Chronotopic struggles and digital mediation in diasporic talk
Excerpt (4) illustrates how the participants engage in a socially consequential negotiation of identity, morality, and authority through a complex alignment of discourses in place, historical bodies, and the interaction order, all set within a semiotic ecosystem shaped by the affordances of the digital platform and the diasporic experience.
This excerpt continues the exploration of identity and moral negotiation within diasporic digital interaction, highlighting how competing discourses and chronotopic struggles shape authority and social positioning in real time. The primary action at the site of engagement is an attempt to affirm or challenge Anita’s status as a legitimate participant in the conversation. Kambiz’s concern about Anita’s age (line 47) is not simply about legality but signals a chronotopic struggle in the sense that he is caught between UK legal discourses about adult-minor interaction and Iranian cultural discourses about age, gender, and moral propriety. His invocation of the UK’s “17 years and 3 months” rule (line 55) is a moment of resemiotisation, where the meaning of age is recalibrated from a local cultural marker into a legal status governed by Western institutional norms. This shift realigns the social action: from casual banter to a legally and morally sensitive act shaped by the discourses in place afforded by the UK context.
The interaction order here is fluid. While the conversation is framed as casual peer talk, authority shifts among participants. Kambiz initially positions himself as a gatekeeper of moral and legal norms, foregrounding a paternalistic role rooted in diasporic accountability. Ahmad participates as a co-monitor, reinforcing the scrutiny of Anita’s self-presentation. However, Anita’s assertive speech acts (“Hey I’m 18”) and humour undercut this asymmetry, revealing a re-alignment of participation roles in which she refuses passive positioning. These shifts index competing participation frameworks: adult-youth, male-female, diasporic-local, insider-outsider. The historical bodies of the participants structure their orientations to the moment. Kambiz, shaped by ten years in the UK, mobilises institutional discourses (e.g. legality, taxation, education systems), embedding them in his bodily memory as discursive reflexes. Ahmad joins this alignment through shared diasporic experience. In contrast, Anita’s historical body reflects a local Iranian youth identity marked by the pressures of konkur (university entrance exams), family surveillance, and the strategic use of digital media for both learning and socialising. Her motive statements, particularly “I study… all day” (line 60), function as moral warrants that reposition her technology use as legitimate, contrasting sharply with the others’ framing of it as socially corrosive. Indeed, motive analysis reveals a key site of ideological friction. For Kambiz and Ahmad, the internet is framed as a moral and infrastructural failure in Iran (lines 56–59), functioning as a mediational means of both connection and decay. Their critique blends individual frustration with broader sociopolitical commentary, drawing from overlapping discourses on digital governance, national decline, and youth morality. This aligns with what Scollon & Scollon (Reference Scollon and Scollon2004) describe as semiotic cycles, where recurring discourses (e.g. the decline of Iranian values, misuse of technology) circulate across multiple sites from diasporic chatrooms to policy narratives and are reactivated in moments of mediated action.
Anita’s retort in line 58 (“You do not use it”) is deceptively simple but works to circumference the discussion: she shifts the scope of critique from a general societal problem to a personal choice, redirecting moral accountability. Her later framing of her phone use as necessary (line 60) further extends this, showing how digital media are recontextualised as cultural tools for educational mobility. This aligns with the semiotic ecosystem of aspirational youth discourse, in which students in Iran balance moral discipline and neoliberal individualism. Her “whatever God wills” (line 62), however, contrasts with Kambiz’s secular materialism (“God has nothing to do with you”, line 63), revealing competing discourse itineraries: one grounded in piety and moral self-fashioning, the other in diasporic pragmatism and financial autonomy. The closing request for social media IDs (lines 68–70) performs a key resemiotisation: Anita shifts from being positioned as a moral subject under surveillance to becoming an agentive participant initiating mediated connection. The platform affordances here (e.g. persistent identity, asynchronous messaging, visual intimacy) extend the interaction beyond the current site of engagement and index the discourse cycle of digitally mediated relationships, reshaping the social field. Kambiz’s response (“Why not?”) signals compliance but also collapses the prior boundary work performed around age, legality, and propriety. The interaction thus ends in a moment of semiotic realignment, where digital affordances overtake earlier moral anxieties, and participants collaboratively recalibrate their roles within a diasporic, technologically mediated interaction order.
In this excerpt, discourse circulates across multiple timescales: slow-moving institutional cycles (e.g. education, legality), medium-term patterns of migration and cultural shift, and fast-paced conversational improvisation. These temporalities intersect in the nexus of practice, where participants actively (re)negotiate identities, moralities, and affiliations within a semiotic ecosystem that is both structured and emergent. This analysis highlights how chronotopes are not simply invoked, but enacted, contested, and resemiotised through embodied participation, platform affordances, and the dynamic interplay of discourse cycles across transnational space.
Concluding remarks
In this article, we have illustrated how online platforms serve as a transnational space in which Iranians across the globe meet and engage in certain identity work. We have shown that such acts of identification are chronotopically organized. That is, interlocutors across the globe use discursive and other semiotic resources to invoke certain chronotopes, spatiotemporal configurations that are created at the nexus of offline and online realities, in which the interaction orders between individuals are reshaped by digital engagement (Al Zidjaly Reference Al Zidjaly2019). Drawing on nexus analysis, we have shown how these chronotopic configurations emerge at specific sites of engagement where historical bodies, discourses in place, and platform-specific interaction orders converge to enable or constrain identity performances. These chronotopes create moments of transnational interactions where multiple cultural norms, behaviors and values come into play, shaping the identities of the participants involved. As such, the interaction in these spaces is not only about negotiating temporal and spatial configurations, but simultaneously contesting and reconfiguring personal identities through combinations of historical bodies and experiences and the shifting interaction orders facilitated by these platforms. These configurations are not static but shaped by the semiotic ecosystems of each platform, which include the tools, texts, and ideologies that structure users’ engagement and visibility. These interactions inevitably bring to the fore the normative behaviors and values associated with each chronotope. We have argued that these have important implications for both the contemporary society of Iran and the host societies in which Iranians live in diaspora.
For contemporary Iran, the analysis showed how such transnational spaces and the identity work done within expose (young) Iranians to certain translocal cultural chronotopes that are conflicting and in clash with values, identities, and ideologies sanctioned by the state seeking to establish an Islamic-Iranian society. In these spaces, as certain timespace configurations are evoked, normative behavior, emotions, and values associated with each chronotope are inevitably discussed. In this light, we saw, for example, how the ‘toasting’ behavior by Kambiz (when he raised his glass of beer and said cheers) and dating culture related to ‘coming of age’ in the UK was introduced to Anita. What ensued was that Anita compared herself in her current offline world with a personhood in the chronotopes of the UK wishing to be there because she considered ‘there’ to grant her more freedom. Moreover, in addition to behavior and values associated with chronotopes overseas, the invocation of certain chronotopic situations in talk—for example, a difficult time in life such as a university entrance exam, and the normative expression of submission to God’s will by Anita similar to Muslims—made it possible for Kambiz to contest that. In this sense, mobile phones could be viewed as ‘cultural tools’ (Gordon, Zidjaly, & Tovares Reference Gordon, Zidjaly and Tovares2017) that facilitate formation of ‘light’ communities and practices online and contesting ‘thick’ identities such as religious, national, or ethnic identities (Tovares Reference Tovares2019). These digital tools act as mediators in a broader process of resemiotisation, where past embodied actions and values are transported into new contexts and made newly intelligible across chronotopes.
The historical body of the participants also plays an important role in how their identities are (re)constructed within these transnational spaces. Kambiz, for example, has lived in the UK for over ten years, and despite being socialized into British sociocultural norms, his interaction with online spaces keeps him connected to the Iranian sociocultural landscape. This tension between the different social bodies he inhabits in the UK and Iran highlights how interaction orders are reshaped through these digital exchanges, where normative behaviours and values from both societies are negotiated. Kambiz’s interactions are not just influenced by his immediate context but are also shaped by the historical body he carries with him, that is, his lived experiences in Iran and his socialisation into British society. In this light, the notion of ‘frozen actions’ becomes relevant, as Kambiz’s past practices and embodied values continue to circulate and re-emerge in current interactions, making his identity work both retrospective and prospective. These dynamics of identity construction in transnational online spaces are crucial in understanding the reshaping of Iranian diaspora identities.
For societies hosting Iranians, the research shows Kambiz’s long-term residence in the UK, coupled with his socialisation into British sociocultural behaviour does not prevent him from crossing borders through online platforms. Borrowing the title of the paper by Fortier (Reference Fortier1999), ‘Re-membering places and the performance of belonging(s)’, we can argue that through invocation of certain chronotopes and these digital exchanges, Kambiz sitting in his room in London both remembers his life back in Iran and simultaneously re-members with his fellow Iranians. In Peeren’s (Reference Peeren, Baronian, Besser and Jansen2006:71) articulation, this shows how ‘diasporic subjects are interpellated by more than one chronotope simultaneously, … by home chronotope, host chronotope, and the thirdspace chronotope of the journey between these two’. This process of ‘re-membering’ reveals the dynamic reconfiguration of Kambiz’s identity as he negotiates between multiple chronotopes, constantly reshaping his self-perception and behaviour within these interconnected spaces. Nexus analysis, through its process of circumferencing, allows us to trace these overlapping engagements by situating identity not within singular moments but within cycles of mediated action across time and space.
Building on this, Blommaert’s (Reference Blommaert2005) concept of ‘layered simultaneity’ further enhances this analysis by providing a framework to understand how these identities are negotiated across different time scales, emphasising the importance of the co-existence of historical and present-day dynamics. This temporal layering plays a key role in the way identities are expressed and reconstructed within Iranian transnational communities, as the negotiations between past and present ideologies often occur simultaneously. In much the same way, Agha’s (Reference Agha2003) concept of ‘enregisterment’ adds depth to this analysis by explaining how specific linguistic and semiotic forms come to be socially recognised as indexical of particular social identities. Within these transnational spaces, the semiotic resources employed by Iranians are not simply personal expressions; they are enregistered forms that signal specific social affiliations, political positions, or cultural identities. Collectively, these concepts highlight that identity formation within Iranian transnational communities is a complex, multi-layered process shaped by both the historical and immediate context, and the socially recognized forms through which individuals express their belonging.
Moreover, these interactions illustrate how the intersection of the historical body and the digital interaction orders reshape identity work. It is through these online journeys that a diasporic subject such as Kambiz carries values, ideas, and behavior across the borders influencing perspectives, values, and cultural behavior among his interlocutors back home. Echoing Androutsopoulos & Vold Lexander (Reference Androutsopoulos and Lexander2021), this highlights how diaspora today is inseparable from transnational digital connectivity, necessitating the examination of identity work on digital online platforms. The reshaping of interaction orders within these platforms allows for the negotiation of identities not only in the context of a single nation but as part of a transnational dialogue between histories and cultures, where digital spaces act as mediating arenas for the simultaneous engagement with and contestation of chronotopic and cultural complexities. As researchers, our engagement in these spaces also reflects a ‘zone of identification’ where we participate analytically and reflexively, acknowledging how our interpretive work is embedded in the very practices we study. Through this nexus-oriented approach, we emphasize motive, that is, not just what actions are performed online, but why and how these motives are interpreted through layered indexical frames, which in turn enable complex and situated identity negotiations.
Acknowledgements
We wish to dedicate a special note of remembrance to the late Jan Blommaert, whose inspiration and encouragement prompted the first author to pursue this line of inquiry while visiting Tilburg University in 2019. We are also immensely grateful to the reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions, which significantly enhanced the final manuscript.
Open access
