Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EmPoWer (Micro-technopolitics of engagement: the everyday communicative practices of women mobilized for gender justice, digital citizenship and better democracy in Argentina)
Période du rapport: 2022-12-01 au 2023-11-30
EMPOWER investigated how, in the face of a democratic system and an institutional fabric that fail them, women in post-COVID-19, post-#NiUnaMenos Argentina seek to empower themselves through communicative practices. Results show how women communicate in daily life about the problems that affect them, the obstacles they meet and the changes they would like to see. The project led to the conceptualization of everyday communicative activism as an element of women’s agency that is significant but insufficient per se to solve gender injustice as a macrostructural issue. Results show that women consider their communicative activism as potentially powerful but recognize that their agency is limited by structural factors.
Everyday communicative activism allows women to fulfil various strategic purposes, including e.g. giving visibility to injustices, showing solidarity to other women, sharing actionable information for solving concrete problems, and tackling gender discrimination in their workplaces. Its usefulness, however, is limited in the context of democratic shortcomings such as precarity, political polarization, an information infrastructure disconnected from their needs and realities, and the persistent lack of progress towards gender justice.
By looking into the communicative experiences of ordinary women as the often-invisible counterpart of feminist organized activism and providing a rich analysis of how they communicate for their rights in daily life, EMPOWER clarified the possibilities and limits of voicing claims as a strategy for gender justice: it identified the various ways in which ordinary women make efforts to speak up about the problems they face and the instances in which, in the absence of concrete solutions to their claims, end up pushing themselves to try to fix at the micro- and meso-level societal issues that require state action. Crucially, the project concluded that, without a politics of listening (Bassel, 2017) such that the state and other relevant institutional actors are accountable for listening to and resolving women’s needs and claims, their empowerment will remain limited.
Through the conceptualization of everyday communicative activism within the framework of gender justice (Goetz, 2007, 2008; Htun & Weldon, 2018) and communicative justice (Kay, 2020), EMPOWER offers researchers, activists and policymakers a theoretico-practical framework that connects the dots between women’s agentic efforts and the persistent absence of actual gender justice, calling attention to the fact that the success of women’s activism depends on the combined possibility and efforts to raise claims, and on claims being listened to and addressed accordingly by the institutions accountable for guaranteeing their rights.
Everyday communicative activism allows women to fulfil various strategic purposes, including e.g. giving visibility to injustices, showing solidarity to other women, sharing actionable information for solving concrete problems, and tackling gender discrimination in their workplaces. Its usefulness, however, is limited in the context of democratic shortcomings such as precarity, political polarization, an information infrastructure disconnected from their needs and realities, and the persistent lack of progress towards gender justice.
By looking into the communicative experiences of ordinary women as the often-invisible counterpart of feminist organized activism and providing a rich analysis of how they communicate for their rights in daily life, EMPOWER clarified the possibilities and limits of voicing claims as a strategy for gender justice: it identified the various ways in which ordinary women make efforts to speak up about the problems they face and the instances in which, in the absence of concrete solutions to their claims, end up pushing themselves to try to fix at the micro- and meso-level societal issues that require state action. Crucially, the project concluded that, without a politics of listening (Bassel, 2017) such that the state and other relevant institutional actors are accountable for listening to and resolving women’s needs and claims, their empowerment will remain limited.
Through the conceptualization of everyday communicative activism within the framework of gender justice (Goetz, 2007, 2008; Htun & Weldon, 2018) and communicative justice (Kay, 2020), EMPOWER offers researchers, activists and policymakers a theoretico-practical framework that connects the dots between women’s agentic efforts and the persistent absence of actual gender justice, calling attention to the fact that the success of women’s activism depends on the combined possibility and efforts to raise claims, and on claims being listened to and addressed accordingly by the institutions accountable for guaranteeing their rights.
EMPOWER produced a rich data set of qualitative data about women in Argentina obtained via a survey, in-person interviews, maps of communicative ecologies and discussion groups in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic: the characteristics of their everyday lives, the problems they face, the solutions they would like to see, and the role of communication and information in their struggles against persistent gender injustice. The analysis of this rich date led to the theorization of women’s everyday communicative activism as a significant element of their agentic moves, in which digital technologies play a messy and ambivalent role. Project results published to date include two open access journal articles and one open access book chapter in Spanish, and a journal article and a book chapter in English await publication at the time of providing this information (February 2024). A monograph in English is under preparation. Results have been shared and discussed with academics, journalists, feminist activists and human rights organizations in Argentina, as well as with academics internationally. A number of public discussions in Spanish and English have been recorded or video-recorded and are available online.
EMPOWER’s results contribute a gendered citizenship perspective to the design of public policy against communicative injustice and demonstrate the need to make governments accountable for listening to women’s claims. Results moreover pave the way for updating benchmarks for gender equality in digital platforms and the news media beyond issues of representation, thus informing not only ongoing discussions in international fora towards Beijing +30 in 2025, when the global community will mark the 30th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, but also post Beijing +30 agendas that take into account the complexities derived from current information and communication ecologies. Results also provide actionable knowledge for feminist and human rights organizations to re-strategize how to reach out to ordinary women beyond engaging their attention and soliciting their occasional support, and propose novel avenues for encouraging, supporting and leveraging their everyday activism for gender justice. The project’s wider societal implications include signposting the disconnects between everyday activism for gender justice at the micro- and meso-levels and the persistence of structural gender injustice, foregrounding the everyday as the agentic-though-structured terrain in which gender justice is effortfully sought by women even if not sustainably achieved, and challenging the idealization of technopolitics as a preferred avenue for solving inequality.