Rethinking the communicative dimensions of everyday activism from the South : how do Argentinian women struggle for gender justice in precarious digital times?

• In this presentation I share work in progress aimed at rethinking the communicative dimensions of everyday activism. My considerations are based on a qualitative, exploratory study of women’s everyday communication practices in Argentina. My conceptual starting point for this rethinking is work published by political scientists Jane Mansbridge and Katherine Flaster fifteen years ago. The notion of ‘everyday activism’ was formulated by Jane Mansbridge and Katherine Flaster starting from in-depth interviews with women in the US conducted in the early nineties, through which they discovered and studied the use of the phrase “male chauvinist”. Based on this discovery, Mansbridge and Flaster (2007, 627) proposed that "everyday activists may not interact with the world of formal politics, but they take actions in their own lives to redress injustices that a contemporary social movement has made salient". Their focus on women’s everyday talk as a tool for persuasive “micronegotiations with their bosses, husbands and friends” (ibid, 628) implied that there is a communicative dimension to this form of activism (see Mansbridge 2013 for a refined conceptualization that did away with the gender dimension). The notion of ‘everyday activism’ has also been used and conceptualized by other scholars in more recent academic literature published in English, with communicative actions as a distinct element (Abbetz, 2012; Vivienne, 2015). Based on a non-probability/convenience online qualitative survey (N=158) conducted with Argentinean women in 2021, in this presentation I focus on those practices and make two analytical moves. First, I investigate whether respondents consider themselves activists for women’s rights (and to which extent) or not, and why. Then, I examine how they communicate about the problems affecting women that matter to them in their daily lives (preferred avenues and ways of doing), what they communicate (core themes and types of content), what difference they think their everyday activism makes (reflexivity about presumed impact), and what they would want to change about how they communicate (improvement of strategy). The approach serves to clarify current forms of everyday communicative agency for gender justice among women, and to unpack how that agency speaks to what Kay (2020) has defined as communicative injustice.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Genusstudier (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Gender Studies (hsv//eng)

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