Gender equality has never been so high on the European Union (EU)’s and the United Nation (UN)’s agendas. While feminists across Europe and the world have achieved significant – albeit slow – progress during the last decades, we are currently witnessing a changed and changing reality in Europe and beyond: since the 2010s, anti-feminist and anti-gender gender discourses have proliferated, both online and offline. Gender equality is a precondition for democracy and as such it is also central to the Union’s existence and its future development. Against this background, our project proposes a solid democratic pushback against the backlash.
PUSH*BACK*LASH has five specific objectives:
1) To engender democratic theory from an intersectional perspective
2) To understand anti-gender discursive strategies and backlash tactics & assessing their effects
3) To identify best strategies for countering anti-gender discourses and strengthening democratic values and practices, taking into account the role played by parties, social media and public opinion.
4) To developing solutions, policy recommendations and context-sensitive tools for engendering democratic spaces from an intersectional perspective
5) To co-create and disseminating knowledge for gender equality
To reach these objectives, PUSH*BACK*LASH studies political actors, their agendas, and strategies that promote anti-gender equality in the European Union, using a large methodological palette – surveys, experiments, interviews, and focus groups, collecting data on public opinion, parties, government agendas, discourses on social media (X) in order to develop solutions on how to effectively counteract these anti-gender equality and anti-democratic discourses.
The project designs and empirically tests counter-strategies to overcome the pushback against gender equality and democracy in Europe and seeks to equip pro-equality actors with practical toolkits for responding to anti-gender equality discursive strategies and backlash tactics. Toolkits and solutions are co-created with civil society partners. Policy briefs and findings will be disseminated to politicians. Cartoons will be disseminated to schools to strengthen pro-gender equality and inclusive attitudes. Podcasts and videos are geared to capture attention of citizens, and theater of the oppressed interventions will be designed and tested to be used with students.
The project brings together civil society activists, EU experts, and multidisciplinary researchers from 11 universities and organizations in Europe.
