Negotiating gender across online and offline social spaces. A study of cyber-mediated gendered norms, practices and aspirations among women of Moroccan and Turkish descent in France and Germany.

Project Information

CYBERGEN

Grant agreement ID: 894468

DOI

10.3030/894468

Project closed

EC signature date 11 March 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 21 June 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 196 707,84

EU contribution

€ 196 707,84

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CYBERGEN (Negotiating gender across online and offline social spaces. A study of cyber-mediated gendered norms, practices and aspirations among women of Moroccan and Turkish descent in France and Germany.)

Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2022-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Against the background of the transnational feminist and anti-racist mobilizations symbolized by the #metoo social movement and the attention achieved by Black Lives Matters in the wake of George Flyod’s killing in May 2020, the CyberGen research project explored the experiences and socio-political views of women of Moroccan and Turkish descent in postcolonial Europe, across France and Germany. In both cases these women can be perceived as Muslim and might thus be confronted with gendered forms of othering in media and political discourses as well as in their everyday lives. Against this background, this research aimed at exploring their trajectories and understanding their social and political engagements. Though addressing questions of feminism and anti-racism, CyberGen did not exclusively focus on activists’ trajectories and experiences but explored these socio-political issues with women in their late 20s, 30s and early 40s across diverse social profiles and levels of social engagement. CyberGen is furthermore centered the study of the role of social media by qualitatively exploring participants’ uses of social media platforms and by creating a database of 123k tweets around key words that relate to the theme of gender and Islamophobia. Set up in collaboration with the LISIS research unit, the database was created by resorting to topic-domain modelling.

This research sheds light on the experiences within and views about the French and German minority and citizenship regimes from the perspectives of young racialized women. Their trajectories illustrate various patterns and degrees of discrimination and racism but their voices equally demonstrate the agency that drives their choices and engagements.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The CyberGen project entailed the following general tasks: literature review, stakeholder mapping, in-person and online data collection, analysis, conference communication, writing and dissemination. Resorting to mixed methods, the project achieved the creation of 2 data sets that sustain combined analyses of qualitative interviews and the data mining of publicly available Twitter data.

The qualitative component of the research entailed 42 interviews conducted with women of Turkish or Moroccan background and 20 interviews conducted with NGO representatives. The fellow conducted in-person interviews in Cologne, Berlin and Paris, followed by additional online interviews owing to the context of the pandemic and the fellow’s recent maternity leave. Resorting to online interviews accelerated the snowballing process and facilitated the realization of in-depth interviews.

The quantitative component of the research, carried out in collaboration with the research center LISIS, relies on the analysis of a topic-domain model of Twitter data around specific keyworks relevant to gendered experiences of women of migrant background. The configuration of the data mining process has been established collaboratively and led to the creation of a dedicated database.

The results of this research have been presented in 5 conference panels (including at the British Sociological Association Annual Conference and at the Imiscoe Annual conference) and are to be published in 6 articles (including contributions to 2 special issues co-edited by the fellow) and an edited volume (co-edited by the fellow).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

CyberGen explores racialised Europeans’ experiences, views and socio-political engagements in postcolonial Europe, and notably participants’ views, perspectives and socio-political analyses on questions of identity, gender, diversity and racism in the society they grew up in. The project contributes to shed light on the lived experiences of gendered discrimination, racism and islamophobia recounted by participating women across two different socio-political contexts.

The project equally builds on participants’ views to examine the varied meanings, uses, appropriation and resistance to terms that name racialised Europeans of migrant descent – from persons with a migration background, to minority ethnic individuals, to racialised individuals, to hybrid constructions such as German-Turk, or else to the collective assignations of the so-called 2nd or 3rd generations. In this regard and through a comparative analysis the project foregrounds structural differences and similarities across the French and German contexts.

CyberGen also engages with the socio-political activism of those primarily concerned with an analysis of participants’ online practices around anti-racism on Instagram and Twitter. The project thus seeks to offer an intersectional reflection on how postcolonial Europe is being actively produced through constant boundary negotiations around who is deemed as more or less belonging, while shedding light on the material and affective implications of these shifting hierarchies.

The implementation of the CyberGen project has also led to methodological reflections around how diaspora and migration research can reproduce forms of epistemological violence, e.g. by ‘speaking for’ or reifying socio-ethnic categorizations. The fellow engaged with feminist and decolonial contributions to explore how participatory methods within diaspora and migration research can strengthen the social validity and relevance of academic knowledge in this field. In that sense, the interviews departed from biographical approaches to revolve instead around participants’ views, perspectives and socio-political engagements. The interviews sought to provide participants with greater leverage in shaping the content and direction of the conversation. The project explored the epistemological possibilities opened up by these conversations while also critically assessing its limits against the background of, on the hand, structural constraints as to what counts as ‘knowledge’, and, on the other, persistent challenges in transforming the power relations that underpin the interviewer-interviewee configuration.

Finally, the mixed method approach, bringing together qualitative interviews and data-mining of Twitter data, allowed for a nuanced analysis of rapidly changing and circulating discourses at the intersection of gendered issues and Islamophobia. The identification of specific types of discourses and configurations of actors thanks to the topic-domain structuration of a database of 123k tweets fine-grained our analysis beyond the level of dominant political and media discourses.

Overall, publications stemming from this research project can inform policy discussions towards the achievement of more inclusive European democracies by facilitating the social and political engagements of citizens exposed to a combination of racialized and gendered forms of othering.

Photograph by Jordan Ajouaou