Social media holds place close to activist's heart

Activist-in-Residence Mona Eltahawy.
(Courtesy of Eltahawy's Facebook page)

Mona Eltahawy wanted to know how many attendees had a Facebook when the new OU activist-in-residence began her discussion in the Oklahoma Memorial Union on Wednesday, Sept. 15 last week. The Women’s and Gender Studies Program Center for Social Justice hosted Eltahawy’s discussion, titled “Blogging for Social Change.”

Muslim activist-blogger Eltahawy, who was born in Egypt and grew up in London, said social media are now important to social change all around the world, specifically the Middle East.

“The question I’ve always asked is, who cares about blogs? Why should we care about blogs?,” Eltahawy said about young people’s reasons to use social media. “Social media have told [the people of the Middle East], ‘You count.’ The ‘I’ counts.”

Center for Social Justice Program Coordinator Stephanie Heck said Eltahawy’s passion for activism through social media made her the top pick for the center’s semester-long Activist-in-Residence program; she is living in Norman this semester while teaching a weekend course, visiting classes and interacting with students and the community.

“I think that [Mona Eltahawy] has a lot to offer and can teach students about effective activism and use of social media [and] using new media as a journalist,” Heck said in an e-mail. “Mona has a wonderful blog, which members of the WGS community (including myself) have been following since her visit last year.”

Center for Social Justice also reaches its students through social media site Facebook as a fan page.

The Center’s mission statement says: “By participating in programs, classes, and events sponsored by the Center, students receive practical and academic tools to better understand the sources of inequality in their local and global communities and the means to address them.”

As Eltahawy spoke about the recent changes in the Middle East political culture, she said Twitter and Facebook have become increasingly essential to the people who live in a world of inequality in countries like Egypt, which has been under a state of emergency for 29 years — Eltahawy said the government imprisoned a blogger who was later killed for insulting the government — and in Bahrain, which imprisoned Internet forum runners because they offended the royal family in 2005.

The number of blogs in Egypt has since spiked, from 280 in 2005 to more than 6,000 today.

“Outrage has been building on social media,” she said about how many more young people are venting about their governments online. “You get online and you share with the world how you feel.”

Eltahawy will be having another discussion Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Union, titled “My America, My Islam,” during which she will talk about Islam in America and the controversy of the mosque building near New York City's Ground Zero site. 

Anyone can visit the Women’s and Gender Studies’ Program Center for Social Justice on Facebook or on their website.