engleski

Empowering for gender equality: role of digital communication in activism of Croatian island feminist groups

Digital communication plays a significant role in today's communication of activist’s groups and NGO associations (Blewitt, 2017). NGO's are organizations voluntarily established by natural or legal persons to promote human rights and freedoms, environmental protection, sustainable development and various ideas on a non-profit basis (Croatian Association Act, 2014). A significant cohort within civil society is feminist groups that promote gender equality and parity democracy, without which there are no genuinely democratic societies. Unfortunately, today's societies, including the most developed ones in the EU Member States, are still not gender parity (Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025, 2020). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the position of women in society became worse than before (Peterman, Potts, O'Donnell, Thompson, Shah, Oertelt-Prigione and van Gelder, 2020). Many women have been victims of cyberbullying (Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025, 2020). As epidemiological measures during the lockdown meant an almost complete ban of all social contacts, much of the communication of feminist groups with the public and their users since 2020 has taken place through digital channels (Digitally empowered Generation Equality, 2021). Digital communication transformation has been a significant challenge for feminist groups, especially those operating on islands. The paper researched the role of digital communication in the activism of Croatian island feminist groups, emphasizing how much this role changed during the pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic. The paper also looked at which digital communication channels researched association's use, to what extent their users have accepted digital communication channels and how and to what extent the communication of island feminist groups will rely on digital communication channels after the pandemic. The research was conducted by the in- depth interviews with representatives of island feminist groups and qualitative analysis of the content of their communication on their websites and social media.

digital communication ; gender equality ; feminist groups ; COVID-19 ; Croatia ; islands ; qualitative methodology

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