Campaigning
The Campaign we chose is A Day Without a Woman its goal is to highlight the economic power and significance that women have in the US and global economies, while calling attention to the economic injustices women and gender nonconforming people continue to face. Women play an indispensable role in the daily functions of life in all of society, through paid & unpaid, seen & unseen labor. They call to be freed from gender norms, expectations and stereotypes. To achieve their goals, organizers in the U.S. encouraged women to refrain from working, spending money (or, alternatively, electing to shop only at “small, women- and minority-owned businesses”), and to wear red as a sign of solidarity.
Mainly they targeted women through their hashtags and the advertisements they displayed on social media from pictures to illustrations to videos, but men were also welcomed to join the march.
A Day Without a Woman is a truly Internet-driven action campaign in support of women’s power that began as a simple Facebook post by one woman in Hawaii. It then evolved into a massive movement that involved seasoned activists. The main “Women’s March” took place in Washington D.C. but was supported by sister marches in hundreds of countries and 5 million marching worldwide, the march was accompanied by a social media campaign educating people about the movement and calling for a strike that shows employers and family members what a day without women would be like.
A Day Without a Woman was a strike action held on March 8, 2017, on International Women’s Day. The strike, which was organized by two different groups — the 2017 Women’s March and a separate International Women’s Strike movement — asked women not to work that day to protest the policies of the administration of Donald Trump. Planning began before Trump’s November 2016 election. The movement was adopted and promoted by the Women’s March, and recommended actions inspired by the “Bodega Strike” and the Day Without Immigrants.
The American strike platform demanded “open borders,” freedom from “immigration raids,” and “the decolonization of Palestine” as ancillary goals to “emancipation of women.”
The group of 8 well-known activists who issued the first call for a March 8, 2017 strike in the United States described it as “anti-capitalist,” “anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist,” “anti-neoliberal,” and opposed to “the violence of the market, of debt, of capitalist property relations, and of the state; the violence of discriminatory policies against lesbian, trans and queer women; the violence of state criminalization of migratory movements.”
In the United States
There were around 1,000 demonstrators outside of Trump Tower in New York City. Four of the primary organizers of the march — Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Bob Bland — were arrested for obstruction of traffic outside the Trump International Hotel and Tower on New York City’s Columbus Circle. Los Angeles held a large demonstration at Grand Park. In San Francisco, a rally at City Hall drew over a thousand people.
In Washington, D.C., House Democratic representatives walked out of the Capitol in an action of solidarity with the protester. An event called “Women Workers Rising” happened in front of the U.S. Department of Labor.
Late night entertainment shows in the United States, such as Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and the Late Late Show with James Corden, all had skits and guests celebrating the strike.
Impact
Some school districts in the United States were shut down because of the number of teachers that requested the day off. Schools in Alexandria, Virginia, and in Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland were closed. Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in North Carolina, and Center City Public Charter Schools in Washington, D.C., were also closed.
The municipal court in Providence, Rhode Island, was closed because of the number of women who participated in the strike.
Criticism
Some criticism of the strike was aimed at the sense of white privilege critics felt was present. These critics felt that the idea was a good one, but felt that only women in good economic situations, mostly consisting of white women, would be able to take part, as women of color (who disproportionately make up minimum-wage jobs) would not have the freedom to take time off work without the fear of losing their jobs.
In response to this criticism, strike organizers pointed out that other strikers in different eras were not considered “privileged”. Sarsour said, “We honor the women who striked in the Montgomery bus boycott…Are those privileged women? What about the farmworkers that said ‘we will not pick this produce without worker’s protections?’ Were those people privileged?”
Our Campaign
We aim to introduce MEDLEB to media educators and media students. We also intend to raise awareness about the importance of creating an association for media educators; because they are the makers of tomorrow’s journalists thus they deserve recognition.
We will also create a countdown for the event, associating it with information such as when and where is it going to take place.
Our theme is how media educators help in decreasing fake news through the courses, lectures and workshops they give, which shows the importance of media education. This is important in Lebanon because journalists are not media educated which contributes to the increase in fake news because simply these people are not aware of the rules and ethics of journalism.
Usually those who study media seek jobs in media outlets such as televisions, newspapers, radios or digital platforms, which give them recognition, introduce them to the people and bring them fame. However, media educators chose not to go through this path, they sought to teach the new generation of journalist. Media educators are not as famous as those who work on TV or radio not because the later are not as important as the previous but because the society doesn’t appreciate their role. Thus, in our campaign we aim to give the educators the spotlight. We will post (Humorous) profiles of media educators. The media educators will be portrayed as media superheroes that stop fake news and teach the new generation the skills of combating it. We will have illustrations of superheroes and the profilers previously mentioned will be as followed:
Example — Meet Professor X his super power is teaching media literacy in the university of Y..
We will also do a quiz related to fake news and at the end of the quiz we will either advice the person that he/she should take a media course, workshop or a lecture according to his/her result.
Furthermore, we will do a Vox Pop with media students about their favorite instructors and their favorite media class. We will also ask them to share the Vox Pop and tag their instructor with the MEDLEB hash tag.
We did not find a campaign related to ours, so we got inspired from A Day without a Woman. What inspired us was their countdown, which we will use, and we will also find a way to integrate the idea of a generation without media educators, through it we will show that without media education a generation of bad journalists who spread nothing but fake news will come to an existence.
