The annual struggle for equality: Analysis of Aurat March coverage in Pakistan's English print media (2018–2024)

Abstract

The Aurat March, launched in 2018, has become a focal point for advocating gender equality and women's rights in Pakistan, while also sparking polarized media and public discourses. This study analyzes the framing of the Aurat March in eight leading English-language newspapers using computational text analysis techniques. Data collected from the Nexis Uni database (2018–2024) underwent preprocessing to standardize text for analysis. Sentiment analysis revealed emotional narratives, with trust emerging as the most prominent emotion across the coverage, followed by anticipation, while fear, anger, and disgust were less prevalent. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) identified five central themes. Using BERTopic, the top terms in each theme were utilized to contextualize and categorize the news content into those five themes: Activism and March Demands (63.3 %), Gender Equality and Rights (21.7 %), Legal and Political Dynamics (10.7%), Social and Media Narratives (3.5 %), and Public Reactions and Perceptions (0.8 %). Co-occurrence analysis highlighted the interplay between Aurat March and supportive and backlash terms. The study explores how media coverage of the Aurat March navigates themes of power, resistance, and gendered activism while shaping public discourse on feminist movements, providing a replicable framework for analyzing large-scale textual data in contested sociopolitical contexts.