Digital activism for political participation: Women’s rights advocacy in Africa and the United Kingdom
Talk by Professor Innocent Chiluwa- Visiting Professor at the CRCC
30th April, at 1-2pm in WAV040 Wavy Top at Loughborough University and on MS Teams https://shorturl.at/uvzS6
The Centre for Research in Communication and Culture (CRCC) is hosting the talk, co-sponsored by the Political Communication and Language and Social Interaction themes.
The talk explores women’s rights advocacy in Africa and the United Kingdom. Women’s rights to political participation and inclusion in leadership have been a prominent topic of conversation in social discourse, human rights campaigns, and academic studies. Digital media campaigns for more political opportunities for women in Africa and the United Kingdom show that women are still quite politically marginalised despite some moderate progress.
Interestingly, social media (SM) affordances have given impetus to local women’s rights groups (WRGs) in the UK and commonwealth countries of Africa to mobilise and campaign for equal opportunities and parity in national governments. Professor Chiluwa’s study will examine online activism by two WRGs each from Africa and the UK to answer the following questions: what is the character of modern WRGs in the light of conflict and new social movement theories? What is the structure of digital campaign approaches in Africa and the UK (e.g., what SM platforms are mostly used)? And lastly, how do we compare the structures of campaign discourses of WRGs in Africa and the UK?
Innocent Chiluwa is a Professor of Applied Linguistics (Discourse Studies), Media and Communication. He was the head of the Department of Languages (and later) Dean of the College of Leadership and Development Studies at Covenant University, Nigeria. He is a visiting Scholar at the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He is a Georg Forster Senior Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) and was a Humboldt scholar and visiting professor at the Department of English, University of Freiburg in Germany. He has published books and edited volumes in media studies, social media and society, discourse and conflict studies and deception studies. He has also published extensively in reputable peer-reviewed journals and contributed several chapters in books and encyclopaedias. He is on the Editorial Boards of Discourse & Society (SAGE), Journal of Multicultural Discourses (Routledge), Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (Taylor & Francis) and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature).