Strategic Datafication and Feminicide in Latin America
Monday, October 21, 11-12 pm (CDT), Online
LLILAS Benson “Digital Scholarship in the Americas” Speaker Series
The activist production of feminicide data in Latin America is a political strategy that mobilises a practice that I propose calling, evoking Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1984) concept of ‘strategic essentialism’, ‘strategic datification’. In making data, activists are choosing to mobilise the dominant paradigm of data-driven rationality, the ‘datification paradigm’ (van Dijck, 2014), to represent and assert ‘the truth’ about an issue we care about. How does this square up with the notion that data are a technology of vision and surveillance, ‘historically tied to imperialism and colonialism, the military-industrial complex, capitalism and cultural attributes of maleness’ (Leurs, 2017, p. 150)? In this presentation, I show how by engaging in the datafication of femicide—which involves datafying the lives of women and girls who are victims of gender-based violence, their killers and even their communities—activists mobilise the legitimising power of data to seek social change, yet remain fully aware and address the role data plays in sustaining oppressive structures and deeply committed to insisting that women are not data.
Helena Suárez Val is an activist researcher working at the junction of feminism and technology. She leads Feminicidio Uruguay (feminicidiouruguay.net), a project dedicated to monitoring, recording, and mapping cases of feminicide in that country, and co-leads Data Against Feminicide (datoscontrafeminicidio.net), an international participatory action research project that explores and supports activist engagements with data to end gender-related violence. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick and an MA in Gender, Media and Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research traverses digital humanities, science and technology studies, and media studies. Professionally, she has an extensive career in web development and digital communications for human rights in international and local NGOs. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Digital Humanities Lab, Universidad Tecnológica del Uruguay and a member of Uruguay’s National System of Researchers (SNI).