Speaking emissaries: Lebanese women’s rights NGO KAFA and its media use for audience mobilization

Abstract

Focusing on a women’s rights group in Lebanon, KAFA, this article offers a discursive reading of the NGO’s campaign strategies that transform discussions of gender-based violence from a private familial to a public societal issue. KAFA, ‘enough’ in Arabic, engages its audience on mediated platforms, providing audiences with participatory strategies through images and videos. I ground my analysis in my interview with KAFA’s communication director, interrogating KAFA’s innovative media strategies to build a wider movement. Using global media and performance theory, I examine how pedagogical media strategies expand the public sphere and facilitate audience intervention into systemic issues. These media strategies act as necessary scaffolds towards building nation-wide support against gender-based violence.

Keywords:

• Global media
• Lebanon
• nationalism
• public sphere
• social media
• women’s rights

Acknowledgements

This is unfunded research and I have not received financial interest or benefit from this research. Aspects of this article appear in my Master’s thesis (Partain 2015) and this research was previously presented at the 2018 National Communication Association Conference. I would like to thank Dr. Karin Wilkins and Dr. Blake Atwood for their suggestions during the thesis-writing process as well as Reem Harb for her assistance in translating data used for this analysis. I would also like to thank Dr. John Brooks for his time spent editing this document and for all of his encouragement. Lastly, I would like to thank the editors and reviewers of this document at Gender, Place, and Culture.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura P. B. Partain

Laura Partain is a PhD candidate researching Middle Eastern communities—Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians—in the Middle East and those living in diaspora. Interrogating ideological messaging strategies in global news and social media, as well as those used in forced migrant self-representations, she takes a media effects approach to analyzing intersections of racial, religious, and ethnic identities at the site of national belonging.