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Informal Learning in Women-only Facebook Groups
Abstract
Despite physical isolation measures deemed necessary due to COVID-19, social interaction continues virtually. While formal education has moved to the online space, it is also worthwhile to consider “informal” education on social media. With the advent of Facebook groups that have moderated membership and content, communities exist where women can ask very personal questions, share stories anonymously, and crowdsource advice and empathy in unique ways prior to these technologies.This space may serve as a refuge for women to share experience with pseudo-anonymity, rendering it a safe space for sharing that is distanced from how these women might appear and act in physical spaces or other Facebook spaces that are not rendered “women’s only”. The content in these spaces could provide alternative narratives around women in Muslim majority countries. It may also instigate important social justices as demonstrated by recent rape and harrassment charges in Egypt brought on initially through anonymous reports and circulation on social media. Women can share their “dreams, desires, anger, and disappointments—in their own words” (Abu-Lughod, 2013, 5) quite literally within these spaces. How has the digital space allowed for a different kind of human interaction, as did the print revolution? I deliberate on how the digital space could be analyzed inspired by Messick, Ong, and Hirschkind in their analysis of text, orality, the audiovisual and its effect on the physical space. This conceptual research explores how a digital ethnography of selective women’s Facebook groups show about their negotiations of relationships. I explore the features of online Facebook groups that define them as community, while expanding on current research methodologically through participant observation, content analysis, and interviewing moderators and other willing participants.
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Other
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