Liane Ströbel

When hashtags give the courage to speak up: language and women’s empowerment on social media

Panel at the Annual conference of the Institute for Social Movement Studies – Social Movements in the Digital Age (Berlin) / Jahreskonferenz des Instituts für Protest- und Bewegungsforschung Hashtags, Tweets, Protest: Soziale Bewegungen im digitalen Zeitalter, Weizenbaum-Institut Berlin

Language plays a crucial role in women’s empowerment, since it can influence the power women have in relation to colleagues, partners, and other people in society.

Especially hashtags have proven potential for mobilizing worldwide attention and accountability to women’s rights by increasing the visibility of several issues that are commonly under-reported. The use of hashtags has helped tremendously to bring several issues that negatively affect women to the forefront of political agendas.

Hashtags are an adequate tool for women to create a space to exchange knowledge and information about their rights, to find supporters in their fight for gender equality and also to share their experiences and to report violence.

In our panel, we will discuss the different aspects concerning the following hashtags or language specific variations of these hashtags: #metoo, #50/50by2020, #womenempowerment, #genderequality or #heforshe, among others.

Stefanie Ullmann (Cambridge University): HashtagActivism as a Form of Counter Speech: The Case of #MeToo

Lorella Viola (Utrecht University): Let’s take a selfie! When social media increase political participation: #GaiaeMatilde, Salvini, and the LGBT community

Annamária Fábián (Universität Bamberg): The #MeToo-Discourse on Twitter in Germany as a protest for gender equality

Liane Ströbel , Francesca Capacchietti, Tobias Gretenkort, Carmen Ibáñez Berganza, Helene Pohlkamp (RWTH, Aachen): Women’s empowerment via French, Spanish, Italian and Swedish variations of #metoo

Background story: From an idea to something we talked about in our doctoral colloquium to the panel!

For more information: https://protestinstitut.eu/tag/jahrestagung/ #ipb19

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