TCJS Online Seminar | Data Feminism

Gender in Japan Series

"Data Feminism"
Catherine D'Ignazio
(Associate Professor, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab)


<Abstract>
As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists ーand others who rely on data in their workー to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: "Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data science and its communication that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, this talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can help to challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; it will explain how an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems; and why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” The goal of this talk, as with the project of data feminism, is to model how scholarship can be transformed into action: how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices.

<Profile>
Catherine D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer, and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology and data justice. She has run reproductive justice hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, and created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Since 2019, she has co-organized Data Against Feminicide, a participatory action-research-design project, with Silvana Fumega and Helena Suárez Val. D’Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work toward gender and racial justice, particularly in relation to space and place.