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The shape of Arab feminism on Facebook

The shape of Arab feminism on Facebook
The shape of Arab feminism on Facebook
Much has been said about the influence of Western culture on social movements worldwide, and this claimed influence has caused some to accuse Arabic feminism of being merely an alien import to the Arab world.

New waves of feminism have arisen as a reaction to the claimed prevalent western culture. Global Feminism argues that women worldwide experience similar subjugation in many social constructs because many cultures are based on a patriarchal past, but other waves reject the concept of a universal women's experience and stresses the significance of diversity in women's experiences and see their activities as transnational rather than global. Others expect that the confrontation of secular and Islamist paradigms will dominate.

Social Media has global reach, and there are signs that Facebook pages are used by feminists worldwide to boost their social and political activism. Facebook gives public pages' owners the ability to associate their pages with pages with similar ideologies.

This provides a global space where feminist pages are clustered and exposes clues about their patterns of influence. By crawling Arabic feminist pages over Facebook, this paper builds a dataset that can be analysed using social network analysis tools and reveals the map of influence between Arabic feminist network and the western, transnational, and Global feminist networks. The map shows that Arabic womens pages are clustered in two segments: Arab feminism, and Sect feminism. The later consists of pages which distance themselves from associating with 'secular' feminism pages whether they are Arabic or not, and in contrary to the former, they are less likely to restrict themselves with national Identity.
Globalization, Facebook, Feminism, Web Science, SNA, Social Network Analysis, Post-colonialism, Arabic Feminism, Women Empowering Projects, Nationalism, Islamic Feminism, Muslim women, Arab women Activists, Identity politics, Salafism, Salafist movement, Islamist ideology, Salafist movement.
307–315
Al Bunni, Nada
5e3c54af-8612-44b7-a741-b03b4d9731b0
Millard, David
4f19bca5-80dc-4533-a101-89a5a0e3b372
Vass, Jeffrey
03532f8b-b227-4511-9387-1865c1001f4c
Al Bunni, Nada
5e3c54af-8612-44b7-a741-b03b4d9731b0
Millard, David
4f19bca5-80dc-4533-a101-89a5a0e3b372
Vass, Jeffrey
03532f8b-b227-4511-9387-1865c1001f4c

Al Bunni, Nada, Millard, David and Vass, Jeffrey (2018) The shape of Arab feminism on Facebook. Web Science 18: 10th ACM Conference on Web Science, VU Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 27 - 30 May 2018. 307–315 . (doi:10.1145/3201064.3201090).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Much has been said about the influence of Western culture on social movements worldwide, and this claimed influence has caused some to accuse Arabic feminism of being merely an alien import to the Arab world.

New waves of feminism have arisen as a reaction to the claimed prevalent western culture. Global Feminism argues that women worldwide experience similar subjugation in many social constructs because many cultures are based on a patriarchal past, but other waves reject the concept of a universal women's experience and stresses the significance of diversity in women's experiences and see their activities as transnational rather than global. Others expect that the confrontation of secular and Islamist paradigms will dominate.

Social Media has global reach, and there are signs that Facebook pages are used by feminists worldwide to boost their social and political activism. Facebook gives public pages' owners the ability to associate their pages with pages with similar ideologies.

This provides a global space where feminist pages are clustered and exposes clues about their patterns of influence. By crawling Arabic feminist pages over Facebook, this paper builds a dataset that can be analysed using social network analysis tools and reveals the map of influence between Arabic feminist network and the western, transnational, and Global feminist networks. The map shows that Arabic womens pages are clustered in two segments: Arab feminism, and Sect feminism. The later consists of pages which distance themselves from associating with 'secular' feminism pages whether they are Arabic or not, and in contrary to the former, they are less likely to restrict themselves with national Identity.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 2018
Published date: May 2018
Venue - Dates: Web Science 18: 10th ACM Conference on Web Science, VU Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2018-05-27 - 2018-05-30
Keywords: Globalization, Facebook, Feminism, Web Science, SNA, Social Network Analysis, Post-colonialism, Arabic Feminism, Women Empowering Projects, Nationalism, Islamic Feminism, Muslim women, Arab women Activists, Identity politics, Salafism, Salafist movement, Islamist ideology, Salafist movement.

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 444784
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/444784
PURE UUID: 4d5d138f-3841-4de5-97a6-fb0b301a9bb6
ORCID for David Millard: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-7512-2710

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 04 Nov 2020 17:31
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 03:00

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Contributors

Author: Nada Al Bunni
Author: David Millard ORCID iD
Author: Jeffrey Vass

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