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Olesen, Thomas

Photographs and images have received relatively limited systematic attention within the mainstream of social movement studies. This is quite surprising given that photographs and images have historically played key roles in mobilization (e.g. Alexander, 2006, 2011; Biggs 2005; DeLuca 1999; Goldberg, 1991; Halfmann and Young, 2010; Sontag, 1977). Within social movement studies framing theory offers perhaps the most receptive approach for visual analysis. In the paper I seek to develop framing theory to encompass a visual dimension. The pivot of this exercise is the concept of visual injustice symbols. Visual injustice symbols are central to framing because they help galvanize and diffuse existing frames by providing them with an emotionally charged and universalizing visual “carrier”. My understanding of this process is dialectical: injustice symbols are simultaneously outcomes of and resources for political activism. In other words, activists and injustice symbols “produce” each other in an ongoing interactional dynamic.

I apply the theoretical framework to the case of Khaled Said, a 28-year old Egyptian man beaten to death by Egyptian police in June 2010. The horrifying cell phone photographs taken by Said’s family at the morgue became a key injustice symbol for the protests that toppled the Mubarak regime in early 2011. The photographs primarily reached a larger public in and outside Egypt through the Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said”. The analysis is divided into three parts: the first accounts for the agency involved in transforming Said into a visual injustice symbol; the second discusses how this involved a universalization of the Said murder ("We are all Khaled Said"); the third outlines the interaction between the national and global level in the formation of the Khaled Said injustice symbol.

318.2 "We are all Khaled Said": Visual injustice symbols and activism