277. Name: Fereshteh Mohammadi Title: Framing Kurdish Female Fighters: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Media Representations of Female Fighters of Kobane in Arabic, Kurdish and Russian Media (Al Jazeera, ANF and RT) Institution: Södertörn University Country: Sweden Date: 2019 Language: English Abstract: With the uprising of the Arab Spring in Syria in 2011, a myriad of news articles, covering Syrian popular protests, were published in the international media. However, it was after the Islamic State’s (IS) attacks on Syria and particularly Rojava (the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, de facto autonomous region) in 2014, that this region attracted the attention of international media. A considerable amount of academic work analyzed the representations of the Kurdish female fighters in the Western media from different angles, such as the framing of the female fighters, their motivations, their roles in the war etc. There may exist a limited number of academic papers analyzing the Kurdish female fighters from the non-Western media perspective, which might present a different picture from that of Western media. Applying framing theory in combination with qualitative content analysis, this study explores the Kurdish female fighters’ framing in Arabic, Kurdish and Russian media, namely Al Jazeera, ANF and RT, respectively. Orientalism, feminist theory on militarization and war, and war and peace journalism theory inform this study on the Kurdish female fighters in these three media.
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