Data Feminist: Catherine D'Ignazio
05.09.24

Open public spaces act as the great leveller in the contemporary city. While buildings often divide us, even public ones, open civic space is where diverse and competing interests meet. From the right to protest to the impacts of those protests on businesses and retail, and from the benefits of surveillance for safety to the infringement on privacy, these interests are often in active tension. With Melbourne and Sydney on track to become megacities by 2050, examining and reimagining the role of these spaces amid population growth, increased densities and a warming planet has never been more vital.

Living Cities Forum 2024 ponders these questions through its slew of cross-disciplinary speakers, spanning architects to curators, academics to landscape designers. Presenting virtually at both Melbourne and Sydney events is Catherine D’Ignazio – a coder, scholar and artist/designer combining feminism and technology to create more inclusive open spaces, both online and offline. Here, Hayley Curnow, NHO Writer & Producer, sits down with Catherine to discuss her progressive ideas on the future of the public realm.

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Hayley: Thanks for joining us, Catherine. Your work explores the intersection of technology and feminism. How can these fields inspire designers to develop more inclusive and equitable spaces?

Catherine: One of my learnings along the way is that feminism is an essential tool in our toolbox if we want to create buildings, products, public spaces and digital systems that work for all of us. Why? Feminism, and particularly intersectional feminism, has spent decades studying and explaining structural inequality with respect to sex, gender, race, class, ability and more. In the context of technology, feminism gives us conceptual tools for understanding and anticipating the ways in which data sets, algorithms and AI will disproportionately penalise, misrepresent and exclude members of non-dominant groups.

One of my pet peeves with tech journalists is when they write news articles about discriminatory systems as if it’s a surprise. Of course, automated resume screening systems, trained predominantly on resumes of men, would then penalise and demote women’s resumes. Duh! This is the absolutely expected behavior if you have any training in feminism, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, disability justice, or other explanatory frameworks that address the root causes of structural inequality. The harder and more interesting design question is how to mitigate these kinds of structural inequalities through design. When we go into a design process we can work to mitigate and challenge such “default settings” through our designs. Feminism gives us the tools for such an understanding. It’s like the healthy soil from which design for liberation can grow.

HC: In your book, Data Feminism, you explore ethical data science practices. Can you share a project or initiative that integrates these principles and reveal how it shaped outcomes for the community?

CD: What Lauren Klein and I do in Data Feminism is to use the teachings of intersectional feminism in order to arrive at seven principles for practicing more ethical and equitable data science. The first two principles are foundational. They are: examine power and challenge power. By “power” we mean the structural inequality that results from sexism, white supremacy, colonialism and so on. The idea with relating these to data science is that we can use data-driven approaches to arrive at better understandings of structural inequality as well as to use data to challenge and change those inequities.

I think these two principles are embodied well in my most recent book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. It’s an extended case study about how feminist activists in Latin America are using data science to challenge feminicide – the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. The book showcases the work of activists like María Salguero. She has singlehandedly compiled the largest public database on feminicide in Mexico and her numbers regularly exceed and contradict the accounts of the state about the phenomenon. Using her data, she has helped families locate loved ones, provided data to journalists and NGOs and has testified in front of Mexico’s Congress multiple times.

HC: As the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab at MIT, what are some of the most exciting projects or research areas being explored that demonstrate the potential of feminist technology in urban planning and civic engagement?

CD: At the Data + Feminism Lab we think a lot about how to infrastructure the grassroots data science being undertaken by feminist activists, tenants’ rights movements, and coalitions for racial justice, among others. In general, I think building feminist technology means supporting and sustaining the vital and under resourced work of these folks. For example, in one project where we are looking at “proptech” or property technology, it’s apparent that landlords have a whole array of tools, systems and tech on their side. Landlords can know almost everything about tenants whereas tenants can know very, very little about landlords and, say, their history of evicting people unfairly or not fixing broken things on the property. Why is there so much information asymmetry? Where are the technologies and prediction systems that help tenants build power? Why are we not building those? At the Data + Feminism Lab, we try to build tools when there are systematic gaps such as these. In a small way, this can help address the very profound asymmetry of tools and information in a profit-driven space like technology.

HC: What can audiences expect from your upcoming presentation at Living Cities Forum?

CD: As I prepared my talk, I reflected on how our designs so often privilege the “default body” which is a body that is elite, that is white, that is male, that is not disabled and so on. It’s a very tiny slice of the population once you start to add up all those privileges into one body! So, the question is how do we make spaces and places and systems that work for all the bodies, in all their situations… with a little bit of joy, and fun, and laughter in the process?

I’ll be speaking about default settings – of buildings, of physical systems and of digital systems – and how we can begin to design beyond the defaults. Largely, I’m responding to a prompt from Ruha Benjamin where she invites us to reimagine the default settings of both our technologies and our societies. What might that look like? My talk is one answer.

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The Living Cities Forum is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

Purchase tickets to Living Cities Forum Melbourne and Sydney here.