Reclaiming Place Through Symbolic Geographies: Visual Resistance on Palestinian Instagram

Palestinians use Instagram to construct symbolic geographies that resist displacement and assert cultural presence. Analyzing 9,126 posts from 834 users posted between October 2023-March 2024, we identify three recurring visual themes that serve as anchors of digital placemaking. The sharing of images depicting everyday routines and familiar spaces functions as an act of asserting belonging in the face of cartographic erasure. Resilience is conveyed through motifs of joy, family, and faith, symbolizing continuity under siege. Knowledge cultivation emerges through practices of naming places, traditions, and environmental markers, reinforcing cultural memory. Comparing Instagram content with 7,448 international news headlines, we find that user-generated posts often offer alternative framings that are absent in mainstream narratives. We close with a discussion of how Palestinian Instagram users created a networked archive that resists material destruction and algorithmic suppression, mapping threatened spaces and producing narrative coherence through everyday digital acts of documentation and resistance.