Wikigender and girls: a no ceilings conversation: digital genres countering inequality and discrimination

Launched on ‘International Women’s Day’ on 7 March 2008, Wikigender is a project created by the OECD Development Centre that aims to facilitate the exchange and improvement of knowledge on gender-related issues around the world. Girls: A No Ceilings Conversation was an event hosted on 17 April 2014 by the Clinton Foundation ‘No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project’, was designed to foster and advance progress for women and girls worldwide. The two projects are investigated here as new types of communication on the World Wide Web. The analysis tries to ascertain whether and to what extent the generic features and discursive strategies of the two new collaborative platforms contribute to the co-construction of information, the dissemination of knowledge and awareness, and the development of a participatory agenda (Jones 2008; Campagna, Garzone, Ilie and Rowley-Jolivet 2012) on themes related to gender as well as resistance to inequality and otherness. An examination of these two examples of on-line communication will entail a scrutiny of new digital genres (Yates, Orlikowski and Renneker 1997), of the genre-specifi c features of web communication (Gruber 2008), and of the democratizing impetus embedded in their discourse. Promoting the exchange and creation of information and increasing citizens’ access to it enables readers to simultaneously become users, writers and critics; it seems to be the new trend of new web-mediated forms of communication that is resulting in the ‘democratization’ (Fairclough 1992; 1995a; 1995b; 1998) of several types of discourse.