Visual small stories of #JESUISAYLAN: sharing cosmopolitan emotions on insagram

Abstract

This article examines the circulation of Instagram posts using the hashtag#JeSuisAylan on the 3rd September 2015 as a reaction to the breaking news of threeyearold Alan Kurdi who drowned in the Mediterranean. Posts are analysed as visualsmall stories (Georgakopoulou 2016) and coded for types of story frames, which helpto clarify users’ participation patterns (De Fina 2016). Findings indicate thatparticipation to this shared story involves acts of sharing transportable stances andcosmopolitan emotions, articulated mainly in the subjunctive mode.. The articlecontributes to the analysis of multimodal posts as visual small stories and the study ofsharing emotions online.