SAUDI WOMEN’S IDENTITIES AND THEIR ONLINE PRACTICES ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between Saudi women’s identities in the offline sphere and their online practices on social media platforms (SMP), namely Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path, and Goodreads. The theoretical lens of Social Identity theory positions its contribution within the field of Sociology, specifically Digital Sociology (DS). The research questions the thesis addresses are: 1) How has the relationship and negotiation between Saudi women’s identities and their online practices on SMP evolved and changed? 2) How do Saudi women represent their identities across SMP? 3) Do Saudi women develop and represent their identities differently across SMP depending on the medium and their use of it? If so, then how? A multi-method qualitative approach is adopted, including online observations and semi-structured interviews. Following purposive and snowballing sampling, twelve Saudi women, who are active SMP users from different cities in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah, Riyadh, Kharj and Dammam/Alkhobar) were recruited. The findings lead to four main contributions, which empirically add to and conceptually extend existing literature on the relationship between SMP practices and women’s identities: a) establishing the reminiscence of online practices as one factor through which Saudi women’s identities are reshaped; b) developing the understanding of SMP ecology whereby Saudi women develop different online identities across different platforms, their online practices vary across SMP that they perceive as different environments, and Saudi women cautiously manage contexts’ collapse/divide with different audiences across SMP in nuanced ways; c) recognising the heterogeneity of Saudi women’s positions towards religious and cultural transformations – namely, veiling, women's rights and (Saudi) feminism; d) stressing the importance of studying these digital phenomena from a Digital Sociology perspective.