Lessons Learned: Re-Imagining Activism in a Digital World
It goes without saying that 2020 has been a tough year for people around the world. So much of our work as activists was community-focused and relied on meaningful in-person connections, which could not take place for the majority of this year. Instead, we found ways to further engage in digital activism. While we did use social media to amplify our work and encourage others to get involved over the past few years, most of the calls to action were also related to in-person actions like volunteering at a shelter or organizing a food drive. Without a doubt, these actions have a profound impact. But with the pandemic, it was not possible to make many of these actions come to life. And so we had to ask ourselves, what are the actions we can encourage people to take online, which will still have a meaningful impact? We had to reimagine activism and to organize with the tools we had available to us and think about the power of social media unlike ever before. The pandemic forced us to re-evaluate our work for a digital world, and after making this shift for over nine months, we have found and developed avenues for activism through digital activism. As some of the earliest users of social media, we all have the opportunity to shape its role in organizing and experimenting with it to cultivate its benefits. Below, we hope to share some of the major lessons we have learned throughout this process, particularly through the recent Virtual Convening on Girls’ Education that we hosted, bringing together Pakistani celebrities including Farhan Saeed, Ali Tareen, and Sarish Khan to discuss one of the most important issues of our time.
While we have run several initiatives over the course of this year for multiple causes, we have recognized that one of the causes that we should all push forward, especially as we recover from the pandemic, is girls’ education. In 2019, we released Destined to Soar, our feature-length documentary film on the status of girls’ education in Pakistan, which was meant to shed light on all the amazing work being done for this cause in the country. At the beginning of this year, we began hosting in-person screenings of the film with universities and schools all over the world and managed to host screenings in Canada, Latvia, and North Macedonia before the pandemic prevented us from hosting any more. On top of that, we didn’t realize that so much would change over the course of this last year, not only for the people with whom we wanted to share our film’s message but in the lives of the girls that we featured in the film. Schools shut down, and girls were the first to leave. In Pakistan, so much work for girls’ education is still being done, but additional hurdles presented by the pandemic have forced activists to come up with innovative new solutions to keep their initiatives afloat and keep girls learning. We knew that we had to talk about the importance of this issue, particularly because of all the changes that have occurred.
We worked with the Global Partnership for Education to bring our Virtual Convening on Girls’ Education together and centered it around their #RaiseYourHand for Education campaign, which has an ambitious goal of raising $5 Billion to transform education in lower-income countries. Our convening shed light on this campaign and was conducted through a series of Instagram Live interviews, in which we discussed the importance of girls’ education with our interviewees.
Had the convening taken place before the pandemic, we would have never thought of using a platform like Instagram Live to host these discussions. Our automatic train of thought would have directed us to record the interviews in-person and publish polished versions for the public to see or host an event in which our guests spoke to a small audience, and we probably would have hosted a Q&A session afterward to create a discussion around this topic. We still believe that in-person events are incredibly valuable and provide a unique opportunity for people to come together for the causes that they care about, but we could not host such a convening in-person, in the midst of a pandemic. The circumstances caused us to think beyond the initiatives we did before, and reimagine methods of organizing and activism. In some ways, it made our initiative much more accessible to those involved. We were coordinating with people based in Washington D.C, New York, and cities across Pakistan like Lahore, all from our home near Toronto, Canada. Not only were we able to arrange the interviews without having to make anyone leave their homes, but we were also able to reach a much larger audience, and spark a much greater conversation on social media than we would have been able to in-person. It turned out that Instagram Live served as a much more effective way to get in touch with people worldwide. In using live discussions for various projects throughout this year including our virtual convening, we have found that we can replicate, and maybe even go beyond, the connectivity and sense of community we can feel through in-person events and interviews.
Perhaps the biggest lessons that we learned from this convening were from the interviews we conducted themselves. In their own ways, each of our interviewees was using their platforms to raise awareness about different causes, and in their stories, we found the different ways in which activism can manifest, in the workplace, in the community, and online. As activists ourselves, we often find that activism comes first, online and in-person, with other passions like filmmaking and storytelling coming alongside it. The people we interviewed were activists in their own right, but they also wove activist struggles into the other projects they did, and still had a profound impact. Farhan Saeed, for example, a prominent actor and singer in Pakistan, has covered various social issues in the television shows that he has acted in, and encouraged his audience to be civically engaged by sharing about the importance of voting on his social media. In his interview with us, he shared how he believes it is important to include social issues and messages into the work that he does, dramas, movies, videos, or concerts, and that people should “get the message while they’re getting entertained,” while highlighting that he believes this is the “best form of preaching.” As we have watched his shows, it is incredible to see how that balance has been maintained, of getting entertained and brought into a story just like any other, but also learning about social issues in the process and receiving important messages that the thousands of people watching can learn from. This is another important example of using storytelling and digital spaces for social good, and activism. At the same time, however, he believes that “everyone should have an opinion,” and that regardless of whether you are a celebrity, singer, or an artist, “you should not hold back” from sharing your opinion on platforms like Twitter. Farhan Saeed has used his platform to actively raise awareness for the causes he believes in, and it is amazing to see the impact that he has had.
Similarly, Ali Tareen, a businessman, and politician have advocated for more inclusive sports opportunities in Pakistan through organizing sports tournaments for girls, while also running the Tareen Education Foundation (TEF) that is transforming the education children receive across Pakistan’s South Punjab region. We met him in person when we interviewed him for our documentary in 2019, and it’s incredible to see how he has worked to incorporate arts, sports, and creative opportunities in the schools adopted by TEF to help children develop their skills, increase their confidence, and provide a well-rounded school experience for them. Amid the pandemic, his foundation worked to establish WhatsApp groups that shared school lessons and helped close the gender digital divide in his community, because it was hard for them to access videos on YouTube due to limited internet access. The gender digital divide particularly impacts girls in accessing distance-learning opportunities because of the lack of technology available to them. TEF also established “mobile libraries” and “mobile schools” through which they visited the children themselves and provided a socially-distanced, in-person opportunity for them to learn when the cases were really low in Lodhran in South Punjab, which is the center of the TEF’s work. It was wonderful to hear the efforts being taken to keep girls (and all children) in Pakistan learning despite the challenges presented by the pandemic.
Finally, Sarish Khan, an activist, attorney, and actress, has worked on-the-ground for girls’ education but also paved the way for women to achieve their dreams by pursuing their own. She is not only a lawyer, but was also Miss Pakistan USA in 2015, and her story was incredibly inspiring for us. She touched on the importance of education in general in achieving your dreams, which underscores the importance of education not only for children in low-income countries like Pakistan but also in all countries around the world. She believes that education reveals “how far you can reach out,” or “what lengths you can go to in your life.” She also shared that “an education is so important because it exposes you to different areas and different fields so you can dream big.” Ultimately, if we are to make sure that all girls have the ability to dream their biggest dreams, and also achieve them, we must ensure that they have access to quality education opportunities.
Our Virtual Convening on Girls’ Education was one of the last initiatives that we organized this year, and while there is a lot of work to be done for this cause, it left us feeling uplifted, inspired, and hopeful because of the opportunities for activism in the digital space. We hope that these reflections also left you hopeful for the future, and opened some new ways through which you can explore your own activist struggles online.