Description
Across the MENA region, we are seeing the development of an expansive ecosystem of social media accounts dedicated to tackling gender-based violence through education and awareness raising, strategic campaigns, community-building, naming and shaming perpetrators and much more. This was expanded and exacerbated in the COVID-19 pandemic context. Across Instagram, Facebook and X, we see activists navigate the complex dynamics of place, (re)producing, reinforcing, challenging and dismantling borders between nations and communities, often simultaneously, while also interacting with narratives of universalism. In examining these navigations it becomes clear: place remains an important dimension of digital activism. Using a digital ethnography framework that combines observations, multimodal content analysis and interviews with 20 activists, I will be answering the question of why this is the case - unpacking the motivations, pressures, digital affordances and more to offer insight into contemporary feminist activism’s relationship with place and centre feminist activists as ontological agents that shape our understandings of a constructed place. This paper is part of my broader PhD thesis that uses Social Movement Theory to examine the role of locality and place across 85 anti-gender-based violence activist accounts in the MENA region, with a particular focus on Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco.
My intervention comes partly in response to discourses of the global #MeToo, as well as more broadly contributing to scholarly efforts to challenge early tech-optimism that promoted the idea of a dislocated internet unbridled by national borders and offering new possibilities for transnational activism. While doing so, my research complicates the common trend in scholarship of binaristically juxtaposing the notion of the global or transnational with the local and particular, to instead present an understanding of place that is dynamic, varied and multiplicitous.
