Events

Co-design, data feminism and counterdata science

In this talk I will give a first-person report from a large participatory-action-research-design project where we are using the principles of data feminism to co-design technology with data activists. The “we” in question is myself, Silvana Fumega, and Helena Suárez Val, and we work in collaboration and solidarity with activist groups producing data to challenge feminicide – fatal gender-related violence against women – across the Americas. As all practitioners know, practice is messy and rarely adheres cleanly to pleasing principles. Throughout the talk, I will highlight resonances and tensions between our design process and the principles of data feminism, showing how we tried to operationalize these principles in interactive digital tools and machine learning classifiers. But it’s not all heroic. I hope to surface my lingering questions to the community so that we may think together about the limitations of designing for justice in hostile political economies.