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.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-01-01 → 2023-06-21
- EU contribution
- €196,708
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
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.
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.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The social landslide provoked by the #metoo movement demonstrated the transnational role of digital communication tools in major societal changes. At the same time, women of Muslim background face gendered forms of othering within media and popular discourses in Western Europe. Innovative research is needed to advance our understanding of how women shape gender norms and practices through appropriation and contestation across virtual and non-virtual spaces. Yet, no empirical study has focused on the post-migration generations with the combined lenses of gender and digital studies. CyberGen examines the everyday uses of digital spaces and social media by women of Moroccan and Turkish descent, in France and Germany, in relation to gendered norms, practices and aspirations through an original methodology combining a netnography (data mining of publicly available social media data) with ethnographic methods. CyberGen breaks new ground for understanding how gendered norms, attitudes and practices fluctuate across digital and non-digital social spaces. CyberGen objectives are (1) to conceptualise patterns of engagement with digital spaces by women of Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds in European contexts; (2) to advance our understanding of transnational and local dimensions of gendered digital engagements within post-migration communities; (3) to understand the articulation between the online circulation of gendered ideas and everyday practices through a doubly comparative case-study of two communities in two different national settings; (4) to produce original and timely data for academic and policy-making realms on gendered norms and attitudes allowing for the de-construction of essentialising accounts; and (5) to contribute to the development of the emerging field of digital migration studies by theorising gendered digital engagements and setting up a new research path. CyberGen promises to inform several EU programmes in the fields of integration and gender equality.""
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS · ParisCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union