Presenter: Kalpana Shrestha (East Carolina University, PhD Student)
Content warning: The presentation discussed in this review focuses on the Global South’s anti-rape movement. Rape is referred to strictly in name only in this piece and is not discussed to any other extent.
Each year I’ve gone to CCCCs, I’m there for sessions about Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) communities or by APIDA-identifying scholars. As a Japanese American who studies APIDA communities, I find CCCCs and the Asian/Asian American Caucus to serve an important role in my professional development and sense of belonging in the fields of rhetoric and technical communication. A keyword search of “Asian” or “Asian American” in the program populates very few sessions because APIDA entails such a wealth of communities, experiences, and cultures that aren’t captured by these keywords. So, to really find the APIDA community at CCCCs, you need to be creative and thorough. At CCCC 2026, my practice to find these scholars and sessions consisted of scouring the eShow Events app each evening and reading as many session titles and blurbs for the following day as I could, keeping an eye out for language that might suggest an APIDA theme, until I had an assortment of sessions to attend. Identifying sessions that combined my interests in digital rhetoric with APIDA topics, I was pleasantly surprised to find quite a few interesting sessions. One such session I attended was PhD Student Kapana Shrestha’s individual presentation titled “Navigating Algorithmic Literacy Practices among Digital Feminists and Activists in the Global South.”
Overview
In the session, Shrestha considered how Global South feminists and activists engage their algorithmic literacy on social media for ends such as advocacy and resistance. Shrestha defined algorithmic literacy as “the users’ ability to rhetorically engage with, challenge, and manipulate the media algorithmic systems,” and her overarching research question was, “How do feminist activists in the Global South engage with platforms’ algorithmic literacy as a rhetorical and compositional practice rather than the technical expertise?” Though the question is situated within the Global South’s anti-rape and sexual violence movement, Shrestha’s research centered around three South Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. With Instagram serving as her research site, Shrestha collected and coded 40 posts from 2018 to November 2024 where users in her three countries of focus used the hashtags #RageAgainstRape and #EndRapeCulture. Though the topic of the study was the anti-rape movement in these countries, the focus of Shrestha’s presentation was on the users and their practices on Instagram as feminist-activists resisting algorithmic oppression, rather than the anti-rape and sexual violence movement itself.
To investigate the research question, Shrestha used a critical digital feminist framework that allowed her to consider algorithms’ power within digital spaces. Specifically, she “position[ed]algorithmic resistance literacy as a crucial feminist practice and a form of feminist labor.” To code for this within her data, Shrestha utilized a multimodal perspective combined with qualitative content and thematic analyses (Vaismoradi et al., 2016).
Findings
From her analysis, Shrestha shared three major findings:
- Hashtags and captions as gateways to visibility and engagement in digital advocacy
- Tagging and emojis as creative practice for navigating algorithmic visibility and coalition building in feminist digital advocacy
- Visual rhetoric as algorithmic practice in creating resistance discourse
Each finding was discussed alongside at least one exemplary sample post. While each of these findings was fascinating in their own way as Shrestha provided detailed explanations of features of posts that illustrate her findings, I was particularly interested in her first and second findings.
For finding one, Shrestha noted that 50% of the posts she analyzed included at least two common hashtags in addition to a trending hashtag. In this way, a user attended to both the local context via “niche” hashtags, as Shrestha put it, as well as the transnational context of the larger anti-rape movement. Because the feminist activists seek for their posts to become globalized, Shrestha observed that the dual approach to hashtags is a form of resistance to algorithmic biases that shadow marginalized users. Using multiple hashtags in these posts demonstrated the feminist activists rhetorical attendance to the transnational context of sexual violence in the Global South as well as how hashtags can function as network framing practices that target the public’s attention. Even so, the increased visibility through multiple hashtags did not correlate with increased engagement, as evidenced by her findings.
Similar to finding one, on finding two Shrestha noted that users made various, creative attempts to increase visibility of their posts that still did not necessarily lead to increased attention. For example, 15 of the 40 posts she analyzed tagged public figures as a means to carry their marginalized voices to a wider audience, while 11 of the 40 posts utilized emojis for varied rhetorical purposes. I found Shrestha’s analysis of “emoji rhetoric” to be particularly interesting because of the overt transnational and sociocultural implications that emoji usage bears. For example, Shrestha shared that in Nepal and India the praying hands emoji, or “Namaste,” refers to “an appeal for justice to a rape victim.” Through this example and a few others, she argued that emoji rhetoric is a “new and emerging way of narrating stories about power, justice, mediation, and violence.” Despite these unique digital practices, however, the continued lack of increased engagement despite the users’ efforts underscored, according to Shrestha, the difficulties of grassroots feminist advocacy in the Global South.
Takeaways
Shrestha’s focus on South Asian feminist activists is an important consideration for the field of technical and professional communication (TPC), particularly within the social justice turn. In particular, Shrestha expressed an interest in the adaptive practices of algorithmic literacy. She suggested that the feminist activists in her study are in a “trial and error” phase of understanding how to boost the audiences of their grassroots activism and that, over time, their tactical and rhetorical engagements will likely evolve and garner increased digital attention. Because Shrestha’s research focuses on the intersections of users, algorithms, and social media through a digital feminist approach, I think that Shrestha’s work pushes our field to invite more transnational perspectives as part of activist user research. Importantly, Shrestha concluded with a statement about how Global South feminist activism challenges the hegemony of western feminists who “portray women in the Global South as a homogenous group . . . often seeing them as oppressed, passive, and powerless victims (Mohanty, 1984).” This point is crucial for TPC scholarship since research on resisting oppressive digital systems that amplify marginalized communities specifically is needed, especially those in APIDA communities and the Global South. Ultimately, Shrestha’s research is contributing to conversations in TPC about “citizen technical communicators” (Chen & Bergholm, 2020), APIDA TPC, and digital rhetoric, and I look forward to seeing more of her scholarly work in the future.
References
Chen, C., & J. Bergholm, N. (2020). Citizen technical communicators: A transnational social justice analysis of grassroots genres during the novel coronavirus outbreak. In Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (pp. 1-8).
Mohanty, C.T. (1984). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Boundary 2(12), pp. 333-358. https://doi.org/10.2307/302821
Vaismoradi, M., Jones, J., Turunen, H., & Snelgrove, S. (2016). Theme development in qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis. Journal of Nursing Education and Practice 6(5), pp. 100-110. https://doi.org/10.5430/jnep.v6n5p100
