Self-representation of atheist identity and construction of counter-hegemony in social media: The example of karikateist selforganization

This research examines the possibilities of communicative action in the position of the other/subaltern established as a hegemonic relationship of the Atheist identity. Some of the Atheist identities, who are symbolically marginalized in the representative identities regime in Turkey, are self-organized with the power of social mediatic self-representation, which aims to overturn the passive representation that is a cause and result of hegemonic subordination and utter a series of deconstructive meanings for the construction of the counter-hegemonic historical bloc. In this research, it is aimed to diagnose the culture modeled by the counter-public discourses of Karikateist, an avant-garde and symbolic power among online Atheist self-organizations, and to decipher the counter-hegemonic discourse structures of Atheist-dominated speeches. This research has grasped the counter-hegemonic self-representation of the Karikateist with the discourse-centered culture paradigm. Social Media-Critical Discourse Analysis method, which is an ethnomethodological digital media adaptation of critical discourse studies, was applied as an approach to data access and analysis. The Karikateist's counter-hegemonic culture is modeled as a social corpus encoded by inter-identity discourse practices. In this context, multimodal discourses in the field were analyzed, and in-depth interviews were conducted to examine the resonances of public discourses in the context of commentators. The findings of the research reveal that the Karikateist crosses the boundaries of being a collective that speaks only on the axis of religion-non-religion, and focuses on all kinds of agendas and appears primarily as a political opposition identity profile. The Karikateist acts as a traditional sovereign in its political priority counter-hegemony.