Digital empowering positivity: Syrian women's counter-discourse for resistance and healing

<p dir="ltr">In recent decades, global development agencies and popular media have co-opted the language of women's empowerment. This article explores how displaced Syrian women from the Global South negotiate and reclaim empowerment through digital media practices in their everyday lives. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2021, it draws on 23 interviews with women displaced by the 2011 Syrian uprising-turned-war. The analysis uses a Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS) framework, which emphasizes the agency of marginalized communities in crafting empowering discourses, alongside thematic analysis of participants' perspectives on empowerment, agency, and representation. Findings reveal how Syrian women exercise agency by creating safer, women-only digital spaces that respond to social, political, and material constraints. Within these spaces, they co-construct a counter-discourse I term ‘digital empowering positivity’. This became a survival strategy against the negativity engendered by intersecting oppressions – war, displacement, racism, misogyny, and other forms of marginalization. These discursive practices fostered collective healing and solidarity, resisting exclusionary voices from dominant groups. This study amplifies the voices and experiences of displaced women from the Global South, highlighting their use of digital media to challenge power structures and represent their own values and interests.