Call for Abstracts: Roundtable on Feminist Perspectives on Social Media Governance

IT for Change and InternetLab are co-organizing a roundtable on April 19th and 20th to catalyze a productive debate revolving around the central question: what new imaginaries of social media governance will be adequate to eradicate the unfreedoms arising from misogyny in online communications agora?

Through this roundtable, the organizations seek to deepen their explorations of their collaborative research project, Recognize-Resist-Remedy, on how women's first-order right to participation can be reclaimed in the platformized publics of the Internet age.

If your research work is focused on the intersections of gender, law, and digital public sphere, we invite you to be part of our closed roundtable scheduled for April 19-20, 2022 to discuss the emerging debates and frame the future directions of social media governance. We expect our participants to be able to subsequently contribute an essay of 3000 to 4000 words on relevant themes, further explained in our concept note here.

How to Apply

If your research work is focused on the intersections of gender, law, and digital public sphere, and you are interested in participating in the dialogue, please send us an abstract of up to 300 words by March 11, 2022, of the intervention that you are keen to make, responding to one/more of the themes in the concept note.

Send your abstract to itfc[at]itforchange.net with the subject line "Abstract for Social Media Governance Roundtable".

Please note that, while we do sincerely hope to accommodate all requests, we only have a few open seats and will be able to confirm your participation once we have reviewed all requests.

About the Roundtable:

One of the key pillars of the project is a focus on legal-institutional responses to gender-based hate. As the issue of social media governance gathers momentum across the world, there is an urgency to ensure that debates and discussions in this regard account centrally for a gender-inclusive public sphere. This, as we know, is a complex question that needs to be grounded in a multi-disciplinary feminist deliberation involving practitioners, scholars, digital rights activists, and others committed to a feminist vision of digitality.

From this starting point, and to take stock of emerging debates and frame the future directions of social media governance, we are co-organizing a virtual roundtable, titled, 'Feminist Perspectives on Social Media Governance', on 19-20 April 2022.

The roundtable will bring together a small group of participants who will collectively reflect on cutting edge issues, deliberating upon the following questions:

• What do empirical studies of platform regulation (and self-regulation) tell us about addressing sexism and misogyny online?
• What legal-institutional frameworks may be appropriate to check gendered censorship and promote gender-equal participation in the online public space?
• What kind of global responses may be relevant towards nurturing gender-inclusive online publics?

Read a more detailed concept note here.

Subsequent to the conference, we are hoping to produce a compilation of essays building on the interventions.

Timeline