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 threeyear
old Alan Kurdi who drowned in the Mediterranean. Posts are analysed as visual
small stories (Georgakopoulou 2016) and coded for types of story frames, which help
to clarify users’ participation patterns (De Fina 2016). Findings indicate that
participation to this shared story involves acts of sharing transportable stances and
cosmopolitan emotions, articulated mainly in the subjunctive mode.. The article
contributes to the analysis of multimodal posts as visual small stories and the study of
sharing emotions online.