Apurahat ja residenssipaikat Tiede Defining dangers to women: a social representations approach to women’s rights campaigns of advocacy organizations in India Päähakija Research D'silva Keshia Myöntösumma 127400 € Tukimuoto Yleinen rahoitushaku Alat Globaalin etelän tutkimusSosiaalipsykologiaSukupuolentutkimus Myöntövuosi 2018 Jos omistat hankkeen, voit kirjautua sisään ja lisätä hankkeen tietoja. Kirjaudu sisään Jaa: Takaisin apurahalistaukseen In this project, I explore how dangers to women are represented by different organisations working for gender justice in India. This topic is pertinent given India’s status as the most dangerous country in the world for women, generating public debate on the treatment of women in India. I will focus on representations at three levels- at the level of production by interviewing communication managers of the organizations, at the level of content by analysing campaign material and at the level of reception by exploring public response to these campaigns. This will provide a multi-faceted picture on how dangers to women in India are constructed by agencies promoting gender justice, the politics involved in such constructions and the messages derived by the public from these campaigns. The theoretical framework of this project is social representations (SR), a social psychological theory that deals with everyday constructions of knowledge. The project will use mixed methods in collecting data and a range of analytical approaches including social representations, visual rhetoric and semiotics. It is also multi-disciplinary, connecting social psychological research with tools of media and communication studies. The findings will be used to publish four articles in international peer reviewed journals. Indian newspapers and blogs of think tanks with a wide following such as the Center for Social Research could be another channel for disseminating my findings beyond academia. Loppuraportin tiivistelmä While India has a long tradition of feminist activism, the issues taken up by different feminist waves have changed over the years. Recent waves have been criticized for their neoliberal influences, homogenizing the experiences of women and promoting individualistic solutions inaccessible to most women. Digital campaigning marks a new feminist wave in India but little is known about what issues are prioritized by these campaigns, what solutions they propose to different issues, which women they aim to help, or how audiences respond to these campaigns. Given the plethora of digital gender advocacy launched in the years before and after India was labelled the most dangerous country in the world for women, the time is ripe for such research. The project thus explored the content and reception of digital gender advocacy campaigns in India. Across different organizations, sexual harassment was the most campaigned issue, followed by female education and female infanticide. A pattern emerged in how these issues were portrayed with the typical victim in sexual harassment campaigns depicted as a young middle-class woman, targeted by working-class men, while female education and female infanticide were depicted as rural issues. Solutions largely called for individual responsibility and rarely advocated for institutional change or collective action. Such representations obscure the vulnerability of marginalized women to harassment, the complicity of the middle-class in maintaining patriarchy and the structural roots of women’s oppression. In studying audiences’ responses to the campaigns, the research found that urban middle-class participants often accepted the neoliberal messages of the campaigns while socio-economically disadvantaged women questioned the relevance of such solutions to their lives. As a totality, the studies highlight the limitations of current campaigning, the power hierarchies preserved by them and the possibilities for a more inclusive feminist project. Takaisin apurahalistaukseen