Sixteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

Social media has transformed from a site of personal communication to a site of political communication, activism, and critical knowledge sharing and solidarity building. While the efforts of marginalized groups, particularly women, to build rich repositories of resources and re-center historically excluded knowledges are remarkable, the instability and ephemerality of social media groups and pages pose a looming threat to the endurance of these subversive, activist knowledges in India. What are the challenges facing social media feminist knowledge building? In what ways can these challenges be overcome or circumvented? Tracing the ways in which feminist activist groups have harnessed social media spaces and tools for creating, sharing, and building communities around marginalized knowledges and the challenges of preserving and archiving them, this paper analyzes the efficacy and limitations of social media as a critical space for feminist praxis.