Reflecting on UN Sustainable Development Goal 9: Industries, Innovation and Infrastructure, Goal 10: Reduced inequalities and Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions, our list looks at the potential for innovation and creative solutions to global social problems, whilst critically engaging with the risks, such as worsened social inequality and damage to human rights.
Subjects covered include the development of sustainable technology to help combat climate change, the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse data more efficiently, the way social media creates a space for people to organise international social activism and the need to balance our digital lives and retain data sovereignty, especially for the most vulnerable in society.
Bristol University Press and Policy Press are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. In Technology, data and society, we aim to address the following goals:
Technology, Data and Society
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Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has been at the forefront of feminist struggles for equality; however, movements to prevent VAWG have been depoliticised, particularly by Western voices, with processes rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. Despite a growing movement to decolonise violence prevention and centre voices and experiences of the Global South, many continue to navigate power-imbalanced partnerships. To dismantle power imbalances within North–South and South–South collaborations, it is necessary to reflect on positionalities and ‘power within’, explore deep structures of partnership models, technical assistance and funding mechanisms, and collectively harness the ‘power to’ create systems promoting trust, mutual learning and accountability.
We conducted a qualitative retrospective and prospective, multi-site case study to generate evidence on effective technical assistance and partnership models for adapting and scaling VAWG prevention programmes and contribute to discussions on feminist funding approaches and devolution of funder power. We examined partnership models and power dynamics among funders, programme designers and implementers involved in adapting Program H (Lebanon), Take Back the Tech Campaign (Mexico), Safetipin (South Africa), Legal Promoters Training and Community Care Model (Cape Verde) and Transforming Masculinities (Nigeria). This provocation builds upon findings from this research by offering first-person reflections from some members of the study team, Study Advisory Board and study participants. Authors respond to provocative statements by drawing upon experiences from this study and other projects for how funders, programme implementers and researchers can better work together to accelerate efforts to achieve social and gender justice within and beyond the violence prevention field.
This chapter draws the analyses from each campaign detailed in the previous chapters to explore overall findings. In short, this research has shown that international Twitter-driven hashtag campaigns can and do have relationships with domestic legal change for women and girls. This research provides crucial evidence-based insight for activists, academics, and campaigners around the world working to improve the lives of women and girls. The data shows that there are certain campaign behaviours which are associated with more positive legal outcomes and characteristics which are linked to negative legal outcomes. Campaigns which are domestically driven, with a high level of foreign attention, showing persistence, engagement, and consistency, are more likely to lead to positive legal outcomes. Conversely, campaigns which lack in domestic drive, can be seen as ‘foreign meddling’ or ‘colonial violence’, and fail to achieve persistence, engagement, or consistency, are more likely to lead to negative outcomes.
With over five billion internet users globally, it is crucial to understand social media activism and legal change for women and girls.
This insightful book examines the impact of international Twitter (now X) campaigns on domestic laws affecting women and girls. Exploring the complexities of legal change for women and girls across seven countries from Latin America to Middle East and Africa, the book offers empirical insights into the effectiveness of hashtag advocacy and sheds light on the role of social media in shaping different outcomes.
This is a key resource for understanding the dynamics driving social media activism and its potential impact on the rights of women and girls worldwide.
This chapter gives an overview of why this book is so important, rooting it in frontline advocacy experience and campaign work. Important global internet and social media statistics are presented to frame the research. The chapter then gives a brief overview of the campaigns studied, the theories used, and a roadmap for the rest of the book.
This chapter explores the two of the eight campaigns in this research which showed negative outcomes after the social media activity – #stopstoning and #letwomengotostadium. Both targeted legal change in Iran. After the #stopstoning campaign there was a change in the law which allowed judges to hand down a sentence of stoning more easily than before the campaign started. Analysis of government statements and legislative reports uncovered indications that the changes to the law were made, at least in part, as backlash against the Western media attention. #letwomengotostadium saw no changes to the law while activists appear to be more rigorously targeted for arbitrary arrests and unnecessarily lengthy detentions, again more so after the campaign started than before. Women’s rights in Iran came to the forefront with the 2022 protests, with hundreds of arrested, killed, or sentenced to death.
The campaign studied in this chapter showed potentially positive results and can, tentatively, be categorized as a possible success. It is a complex story as the campaign did so much for women in Saudi and was considered a milestone success, but in the years since the government has cracked down on activism and activists who use social media. However, some do still see the change as a watershed moment which has paved the way for other opportunities for women in Saudi. This may just underscore the power of the campaign and how it forced the government to change. The campaign may therefore provide critical insight into what an ‘ideal’ hashtag campaign might look like from a feminist perspective.
This chapter sets out the framework and design of the study, first exploring the theories underpinning the work and then moving into the specifics of how data was collected and analysed. This work is underpinned by three main theoretical frames: theories of legal change as specified Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink’s spiral model of human rights change and the critiques thereof, media effects/social media theory based on the work of Castells and the Gladwell–Shirky debate, both viewed through a fourth wave feminism and digital feminist activism lens drawing on the work of Hemmings, Rentschler, and boyd in particular. These three theories, woven together, provide the understanding for research design, structuring the study, and guiding the analysis and conclusions.
The group of campaigns studied in this chapter showed, on balance, little to no change. There were gains in some areas and losses in others, rendering the situation for women and girls on the ground no different than before the campaigns. While the gains and losses differed in each campaign, these campaigns showed striking similarities in Twitter behaviours. They all gained significant attention in the timeframe immediately after the spark incidents, but very quickly faded from public consciousness. It appears this initial mass interest led to some small changes but without continued public pressure or interest the governments were free to ignore the long-term goals of the campaigns, once again manifesting both critiques of the spiral model of human rights change theory and, to some extent, media effects theory. Feminist critiques were perhaps less evident in these campaigns.
The set of campaigns in this chapter showed very similar outcomes as well as Twitter campaign behaviours. Both climaxed near domestic, democratic elections with the possibility of regime change, and in both cases the government in power implemented legislative change extremely quickly (the ‘tactical’ concessions as specified in the theoretical spiral model). The legislative changes were generally seen as responses to the public attention driven by social media and indeed, on paper, met many of the goals of the campaigns regarding the letter of the law. However, likely due to the speed with which the changes were made and the governments’ lack of long-term attention to the issues, little to no change has been seen on the ground. Metrics of institutionalization, in India, underscore the short-term, reactionary nature of the changes.
Chapter four looks at i-doc aesthetics, showing how designing aesthetic features can help researchers to focus on dimensions of affect, mood, atmosphere, emotion, and feeling in their topics. It also examines how aesthetic design for i-docs, as a mode of encountering the world, can do important work of illuminating entanglements of moods and affects at different scales, revealing how localised moods and affects connect to more pervasive structures of feeling. The chapter explores this by focusing on the i-docs The Lockdown Game and The Temporary City.
