The online video session of the Gender and Communication Section features a roundtable in which leading feminist media scholars reflect on how the personal and the political, the domestic and the civic, the individual and the social are intersecting in the current moment of the Covid-19 pandemic. IAMCR members can login to watch the full session. Not a member? Join now to access all IAMCR 2020 papers and video sessions until 12 September 2020. Your membership will remain valid until 31 December 2021!
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Session description
This roundtable brings together leading feminist media scholars to reflect on how the personal and the political, the domestic and the civic, the individual and the social are intersecting in new, and perhaps also old, ways in the current moment of global suffering and uncertainty, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The aim is to build a multi-cultural, trans-global and intersectional conversation on how gender and communication matter in the current moment, with the understanding that the “here” is still shaped by patriarchal power, and the “now” is increasingly moulded through communications technologies.
Speakers reflect on three key themes, linked to the domestic, the public, the pandemic: 1) How can feminist thinking help us to make sense of “home”, in this moment in which to “work from home” means housework, child care, intellectual labour, and increasing amounts of screen-based communications? 2) How can feminist solidarity and political participation be forged in this age of isolation, distancing, and growing forms of fake news, suspicion and paranoia of and simultaneously calls for charity, worry, pity and concern for the “other”? 3) How is the pandemic reshaping gendered technologies, of self, community, news-making and activism? What kinds of communicative futures might we expect to see, and how might they be gendered in familiar, or unfamiliar, ways?
Chair: Mehita Iqani (University of the Witwatersrand)
Panelists:
Xiyuan Liu (International College Beijing, UC Denver)
Beatriz Polivanov (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
Shani Orgad (London School of Economics)
Pumla Dineo Gqola (Nelson Mandela University)
Shilpa Phadke (Tata Institute of Social Sciences)