DE-CONSTRUCTING ‘GENDER IDEOLOGY’ MYTHS ON REPRODUCTION AND DIGITAL STORYTELLING THROUGH CDA: A CASE STUDY OF WOMEN’S NGOS SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT ON TWITTER AND FACEBOOK”

Abstract

This research explores the findings on the social media engagement and advocacy activities of 52 women’s health NGOs from across the world during the year of 2019, amid an environment of hostility and attacks of far-right groups against women’s rights, and particularly in areas such as women’s sexuality and female bodies. These findings are only a small part of a larger four year study, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), which examined the advocacy communication activities of NGOs working on women’s health in the US, Europe, Latin America, Brazil and India. Questions included how NGOs’ communication strategies reflect on their communication activities, and how they combine offline and online media to advocate on SRHR. The research made use of a mixed methods approach which included in depth interviews with 50 CEOs from the organizations as well as a short survey applied to the communication directors of these NGOs, including from Care International UK to Anis Brazil. This was combined with critical discourse analysis (CDA) of their institutional websites, as well as their social media engagement on social network platforms. This paper focuses on the CDA results of the social media engagement of the organizations conducted during the months of March and April 2019, when a total of 1.505 tweets were collected. Findings show an emphasis on ‘hard fact’s, including NGO journalism devices such as ‘fact checking’, however with a growth in use of more human interest stories, particularly making use of storytelling, to reach out to larger audiences.