At SU Gender, we organized our annual series of events throughout March as part of 8th of March, International Women's Day this year. Within the scope of these events titled Gender and Feminism in the Digital Age, we organized panels, workshop activities and a quiz. We disseminated the March 8 messages shared with us by Sabancı University faculty, staff and students by using images. Our shared March 8 message this year was about the pandemic and digital activism. You can read about our month of activities below.

Curious Steps at the Women of the World Festival

As part of the British Council and Sabancı Foundation's International Women's Day celebrations, we held a workshop at the Curious Steps team within the framework of the Women of the World Festival held in Istanbul on 5-7 March. We participated in the festival focusing on the theme of "Being a Woman in the City" with our workshop titled "Curious Steps: Exploring the City with Stories". After the digital Curious Steps walk presented by Ayşe Gül Altınay, İlayda Ece Ova and Özge Ertem, a gender and city-oriented story writing activity was facilitated by Ebru Nihan Celkan.

Digital Grief, Solidarity and Gender

At the event we held on March 16, we opened up digital mourning and solidarity to discussion through the lens of gender. In her speech titled “Mourning and Sharing Grief”, Nazlı Hazar conducted a discussion on what the law and digital fields have to offer, based on her own thesis study and story. Selen Çatalyürekli gave a presentation on the project "Encountering Steps: Digital Story Map of Migrants' Solidarity" carried out within the scope of the Curious Steps, and premiered the stories. With the questions and comments that followed, we continued to chat in the context of gender and digital solidarity.

We Met at Digital Activism Events

In the two events we organized on March 27, we discussed the meeting points of digital channels, activism and feminism from different perspectives. First, in the event titled “How Far Can The Things We Do On The Internet Reach?”, we discussed the creative use of digital tools and policy making for such tools addressing by different cases. Kiraz Akın (senlik.blog), Aslı Alpar (kaosGL), Hazal Sipahi (Mental Klitoris) and Efruz Kaya (Pink Life) contributed as speakers to the discussion, which was facilitated by Fulya Kama. In another session titled “Remove This Mention of Ours: A Digital Activism Workshop”, organized together with the Gender Club, we were trained on data scraping tools and we discussed how we can use it in digital media.

Webinars on Sexual Harassment, Gender Based Violence and Discrimination

At SU Gender, we continued our webinar series on sexual harassment, gender-based violence, diversity and inclusion within and outside the university as part of the March Events. Nilay Abınık, Çiğdem Mater and Damla Songur were the speakers of the tenth meeting, held on March 31: "Combating Cyberviolence". In the webinar, we discussed the psychological and legal aspects of digital violence and the methods of combating violence, and listened to the experience of the #SusmaBitsin Platform which struggles to end harassment, violence, mobbing and discrimination in the cinema, television and theater industries. 

To see the past videos of the webinar series, please visit SU Gender's youtube channel