Karen Ross
Newcastle University
AGEMI takes an innovative and integrated approach to combating gender stereotypes and promoting equal opportunities, by designing educational and knowledge-based resources aimed at inspiring and informing the next generation of journalists, as well as curating a range of useful resources for the busy media professional.
AGEMI is a very good example of a research-informed and collaborative action project, using the findings of decades of research on the broad topic of gender and in/equality in the media and translating them into, among other things, a set of learning resources to raise awareness of both the problems of gender in/equality in the media but also the range of good practices which have been created to challenge them. AGEMI’s consortium members are the Universities of Newcastle (Lead – UK), Padova (Italy) and Gothenburg (Sweden), together with the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and the Permanent Conference of Mediterranean Public Sector Audiovisual Media (COPEAM). It is co-funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the European Union and responded to a call to ‘do’ something concrete in terms of challenging gender inequality. By taking an integrated and multi-stakeholder approach, we hope that students and practitioners will develop strategies to promote a gender-aware professional practice.
So, what exactly is AGEMI? We believe that we have developed a one-stop shop for anyone interested in promoting gender equality in the media, comprising the following resources:
Resources Bank of Good Practices: we have collected examples of good practice from across Europe and further afield which are searchable in several ways including through key words, eg ‘leadership’ or ‘equality policy’. We have developed a series of learning resources which are thematically-focused (eg representation, employment, culture, advocacy, policy, technology) and stand-alone but which can also be conceived as a course. The comprise a mix of mini-lectures, interviews with practitioners and gender experts, further resources and student-based activities. All the learning resources can be viewed as streamed content or downloaded for later viewing and use and all the moving image resources are subtitled in English, French and Spanish.
There’s also the AGEMI app, which is a simple tool which enables citizens to interrogate a news article, give it a gender-sensitivity score and then write an email to the editor (or complaint or congratulation) using some guidelines and a template which we have provided. This could also be used in the classroom to undertake some basic media monitoring. Although the funding for the project is coming to an end, we are keen to continue adding more materials to the website by crowd-sourcing good practices, including examples of gender-sensitive journalism.
The project commenced in 2016 and concludes in 2019, just before the Beijing Platform for Action celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2020, and has evolved as part of an open dialogue with ongoing international efforts to mainstream media gender equality worldwide, such as the Global Alliance for Media and Gender (GAMAG) and UNESCO’s UniTWIN Network for Gender Media and ICTs. This dialogue has provided further opportunities to link centres and peripheries of relevant practice-based knowledges, within and beyond academic communities. Opportunities have also arisen to collaborate with other EU-funded projects, such as the Erasmus Virtual Exchange (EVE) project, which focuses on innovative forms of education through the use of online teaching modes that foster transnational knowledge sharing and intercultural encounters amongst young people (students, citizens, media professionals) from Europe and the Mediterranean region. EVE is running a MOOC using the AGEMI resources in September, see here *for details, all welcome.* Engaging in such multi-stakeholder dialogues – involving researchers, practitioners and policy-shapers – also supports the adoption of an integrated approach to translation, including interpretation of data, use of different languages and development of tools and methods for sharing the expertise embedded in the project.
We encourage everyone to visit the website, have a look around and explore the resources. Everything is feely available to download (although you will need to register to explore the learning resources apart from the introduction, but that takes a matter of moments), although we kindly ask you to email us if you want to access entire units so we can keep track of which materials are being downloaded. Get back to meif you want any further info about AGEMI, or send the team an email.
Facebook: @Agemigender
Twitter: @Agemi_eu
Instagram: Agemi.eu
*if you are reading this in hard copy and interested in EVE or anything else in this item, please contact me: karen.ross@ncl.ac.uk