About the project

How is feminism making change in young people’s everyday lives?

In a social media age where news and ideas travel fast, feminism has become hard to ignore. For people who have come of age with the internet, how does this shape feminism, feminist knowledge, and its everyday impact?

We wanted to know how feminism has actually made an impact and how you use it in your day to day life.

For young people, online culture has transformed the accessibility of feminism and cultures of social justice. Yet, while online culture may now be a primary resource for coming to terms with the significance of progressive politics, this project examines how online feminist knowledge cultures are also invested with their
own hierarchies and boundaries in relation to expertise, authority and truth.

Project numbers

50 participants

across a range of ethnicities, gender and sexual identities

16 workshops

and over 84 interviews

7560 minutes

of interview data

3 years, 9 months

from inception to findings (and a baby!)

Project phases

The project involves data collection with participants across 3 points in time across 2021 – 2022. This data collection, structured over three points in time, is designed to allow participants time to reflect on their experiences, revise their positions, and contextualize their perspectives in terms of their life stages.

Phase 1

In phase 1 of this project, we invited feminists age 18 – 28 to share their observations and experiences in small, online group workshops of 4 – 5 people. We ran over 16 workshops during this time, focusing on:

✦ Mapping common feminist concepts learned through digital culture
✦ Identifying positive and negative experiences within feminist social
media.

Phase 2

We ran one-on-one interviews, exploring individual contexts of digital feminist
learning and everyday mobilization of feminist concepts, with participants
sharing examples of current feminist social media content.

We also considered individual history and identity in shaping how online contexts and cultures were experienced.

Phase 3

One year on from our original interviews, we ran follow-up individual interviews. We
explored any changes in individual contexts of digital feminist learning
and everyday mobilization of feminist concepts.

The data was then transcribed, analysed and synthesised into insights and materials.

This project has obtained approval from the Monash Human Ethics Committee (Project ID: 27937)