EmPoWer · Micro-technopolitics of engagement: the everyday communicative practices of women mobilized for gender justice, digital citizenship and better democracy in Argentina
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-12-01 → 2023-11-30
- EU contribution
- €239,957
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Micro-technopolitics of engagement: the everyday communicative practices of women mobilized for gender justice, digital citizenship and better democracy in Argentina
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.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Argentinian women constitute 51,1% of the country's population but are unequally affected by poverty, discrimination and violence. Since 2015, they have increasingly protested this state of affairs via collective mobilizations on International Women’s Day and the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, by organizing to raise specific claims, such as the right to abortion or the denunciation of rape. But how does their political agency unfold in the in-between times and spaces when collective protests are not taking place? What communicative practices do they engage then? This project investigates if and how female citizens’ everyday uses of mediated communication for justice produce democratic resolution of their claims in the context of the dataification of governance, the deficient responses of social media companies to spiraling online violence and abuse against women and other challenges to their participation in digital citizenship. The case study is emblematic of citizen-driven technopolitical efforts taking place in the Global South to fix gender inequality and other broken elements of democracy. Through a multi-method design, the study will unpack the ways in which Argentinian female citizens appropriate and interpret mediated communication in everyday technopolitics, and to which democratic effect. Results will: a) provide actionable information for female citizens to refine their day-to-day communicative practices for justice; b) advance methodological tools for monitoring strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats pertaining to their communicative agency in a changing digital environment; c) and contribute potential solutions to omissions/shortcomings in reciprocal listening to their claims from governments, corporations and other accountable organizations. The study will thus inform a future governmentality that takes responsibility for addressing citizens’ claims for justice rather than counter them.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
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Data: CORDIS, © European Union