Description
This paper explores how women’s grassroots organisations engage with subversive humanitarianism to support refugee women’s digital accessibility, inclusion, and activism: an area often overlooked by the public sector, charities, and large humanitarian actors. Drawing on ethnographic methods employed in a two-hour awareness-raising training session co-organised with WAST (Women Asylum Seekers Together) in Manchester, the study investigates the potential benefits and risks of refugee women’s use of digital technologies and social media. It explores how migrant women understand and use social media as a tool for survival, solidarity, and resistance, as well as for maintaining ties with home countries and accessing communities and resources, while also recognising risks such as Home Office’s digital surveillance, privacy violations, and hate speech and discriminatory algorithms on social media in the current context of rising anti-immigration and anti-gender ideologies. The paper highlights how women’s grassroots organisations not only provide immediate practical support but also act as sites of integration and digital citizenship, where migrant women collectively develop strategies to counter isolation, xenophobia and digital exclusion. The findings contribute to broader debates on feminist digital activism, critical approaches to citizenship, and community-led models of integration in the UK, demonstrating how digital spaces can become critical terrains of belonging and resistance for migrant groups.
