Rethinking Digital Spaces through Feminism: Instagram as an Educational Environment

Some studies refer to the so-called fourth wave of feminism, characterized by the use of social media as a space for claims of gender-related political instances. This can contribute to transform platforms into pedagogical environments to learn to challenge forms of daily discrimination. A further element that characterizes the spread of digital feminism is the possibility of transforming, through the use of social media, 'being a feminist' into something desirable among the younger generations. This proposal tries to analyse Instagram as a sociomaterial space of sharing in order to question the learning processes with/in social networks. Learning processes are enacted by the interaction with Instagram profiles and Instagram pages that create feminist complaint contents, thus rethinking the way of seeing and experiencing genderized bodies and social relations. Online spaces shape, constrain and perform the emergence of a feminist sensibility situated in daily practices of activism whereby 'difference' becomes a functional category to make visible the social and material experience of marginalised bodies. This is an ongoing research, that starts with an initial empirical inquiry carried out to analyse whether some Instagram pages (collective and individual) dealing with feminist issues can become an educational and/or informal learning space to share and shape new forms of feminist experiences aimed at questioning assumptions, and gender stereotypes and constrains often taken for granted in everyday life.