Monika Tosik

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(Dis)united We Post: Religion, Digital Borders, and Discourses of (Un)belonging

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The present paper investigates how religion-coded talk functions both to unite – by forging solidarities through collective emotionality and communities of shared values – and to divide – by constructing religion as a threat within migration-related platformed discourse – and how such security narratives police and perpetuate (un)belonging through digital borders (Chouliaraki & Georgiou, 2019). Thematically, it examines online discourses about the refugee crisis, migration, and terrorism, focusing on how religious markers – especially the Islam-violence-terrorism blend – are mobilised to construct symbolic (cultural-moral) and physical (security) threats that legitimise exclusion and mobilise hostility and support for restrictive measures. The following questions are addressed: (1) How do representations of migration construct the (Other as) enemy, threatening “our” identity, values, and cohesion through religion-coded narratives – and, conversely, how do they reinforce solidarities and intragroup cohesion? (2) How do platform affordances (interactivity, interconnectedness, intertextuality) and semiotic resources enable representational and interpersonal proximization, leading to the construction of digital borders or their contestation? The dataset (588,214 words) comprises online articles and YouTube videos with comment threads. Methodologically, qualitative analysis (identifying media proximization triggers in lexis, syntax, imagery, pragma-rhetoric, and visual techniques) is combined with quantitative corpus tools (keyness, concordances, word sketches).