%0 Journal Article %J International Communication Gazette %D 2018 %T Social media as third spaces? Exploring Muslim identity and connection in Tumblr %A Pennington, Rosemary %X Third spaces have been imagined as sites of resistance, where hegemonic and normative understandings of the world may be challenged. New media are often imagined to have this liberatory potential as well, particularly for those individuals who experience social, cultural, or political marginalization. This research considers whether social media might help facilitate third spaces. It takes as a case for exploring this topic the experience of 188 Muslim bloggers in social networking site Tumblr. Many of these individuals live in non-Muslim majority countries and say they sometimes feel stuck between identities. The qualitative analysis of their blogs, as well as interviews with 30 of the bloggers, seeks to understand how Tumblr can facilitate third spaces where these bloggers can explore the hybrid nature of their identities while connecting to others who share that experience. %B International Communication Gazette %G eng %U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1748048518802208?journalCode=gazb %0 Journal Article %J Journal of Communication Inquiry %D 2018 %T Making Space in Social Media: #MuslimWomensDay in Twitter %A Pennington, Rosemary %X At the end of Women’s History Month 2017, social media sites were filled with posts using the hashtag #MuslimWomensDay. Muslim women have often been framed in media as either victims of a violent faith and its believers or enablers of that violence, rarely are they given the space to tell their own stories. The #MuslimWomensDay hashtag was designed to draw attention to the stories and experiences of Muslim women. This qualitative textual analysis of approximately 300 tweets explores how Twitter users deployed the #MuslimWomensDay hashtag in their posts in order to understand the story users told of what it means to be a Muslim woman as well as what narratives of Islam they had to fight against. %B Journal of Communication Inquiry %G eng %U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0196859918768797