Between April 7, 2017 when Dr. Stella Nyanzi, an academic and activist was arrested for the first time for her Facebook posts and February 20, 2020 when she was acquitted and a conviction and sentence of offensive communication quashed leading to her release from jail, we coordinated several hashtag campaigns primary on X (then Twitter) and other social media platforms as forms of solidarity with the political prisoner. We used #FreeStellaNyanzi, #PushforStellaNyanzi, #45Poems4Freedom, and other hashtags to mobilize an online community to create awareness and put pressure on the long-lasting administration of Yoweri Museveni to release Dr. Nyanzi. The community formed through these hashtags engaged in a practice of “digital feminist solidarity”. This panel invites individual academics, organizers and activists who contributed to the allied hashtag campaigns between 2017 and 2020 to articulate their visions of digital feminist solidarity based on auto-ethnographic and auto-theoretical reflections on their participation in the said campaigns.
Email abstracts, briefly describing your participation / contribution to the allied hashtag campaigns namely #FreeStellaNyanzi, #Push4StellaNyanzi and #45Poems4Freedom, among others and how it shaped your understanding of “digital feminist solidarity” to bbwamwesigire@csudh.edu by Wednesday March 12, 2025 at 23:59 PST.
