Examining everyday discourses of Black Lives Matter Oklahoma City

Abstract

This ethnography of communication invokes the principle of dialogism from the Bakhtinian framework of discourse analysis and employs digital ethnography to examine the everyday discourses of the BLM Oklahoma City Chapter (BLM OKC). A total of 163 Facebook posts, informal interviews and two formal interviews of the chapter were collected and analysed. The analysis revealed that the discourses of BLM OKC on the local level align with the global level, that BLM OKC employs framing to facilitate sensemaking of the black experience – effectively challenging popular discourses in a way that frames and (re)frames the received chronotopes and origin myths of mainstream society. These findings in relation to police brutality and killings, race and discourse of nostalgia are discussed.