Notices by Catherine D'Ignazio (she/ella) (kanarinka@mastodon.mit.edu)

It's here! I'm thrilled to announce that my new book "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" with @themitpress is here! https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048873/counting-feminicide/
Here's a 🧵about it! 1/12

Counting Feminicide comes from my work with Helena Suárez Val, Silvana Fumega
And Isadora Cruxen on #DataAgainstFeminicide. It documents the intellectual and emotional labor of data activists in the Americas & how their work challenges the hegemonic and extractivist logics of mainstream data science. 2/12

In the Introduction, I describe how I came to the topic through the work of
María Salguero in Mexico, how we started #DataAgainstFeminicide, and how I saw resonance between the principles of data feminism and grassroots data science on gender-related violence. 4/12

The book argues for more 🦋inclusive and liberatory technological imaginaries🦋alternative visions of who AI and data are for, why we count & quantify, & what transformative potential is possible with technology (once we abandon Silicon Valley profiteering and extractivism). 3/12

Chapter 1 covers a short history of the terms femicide, feminicide, #MMIWG2S, #SayHerName and other forms of fatal gender-related violence, and links them to longstanding efforts of community defense as well as literature on data activism. 5/12

Chapter 2 describes a case study in Puerto Rico by El Observatorio de Equidad de Género and concepts such as official data, missing data, and counterdata. It theorizes activists' work as "restorative/transformative data science", a concept that emerged from dialogue with activists themselves. 6/12

At each of these stages, the data epistemologies, emotional labor, and practices of memory and care employed by data activists challenge conventional wisdom around hegemonic data science. 8/12

Chapters 3-6 draw from our team's in-depth interviews with 40+ feminicide data activist groups across the Americas. Their restorative/transformative data science process can be divided into 4 stages: (1) Resolving (2) Researching (3) Recording and (4) Refusing & Using data. 7/12

In Chapter 7, I describe the #DataAgainstFeminicide team's experience co-designing technologies with data activists, e.g. using AI and machine learning to detect human rights violations. But we still have many critical questions about this work. 9/12

Chapter 8 presents a more generalized and practical Toolkit for Restorative/Transformative Data Science that emerges from this work, geared towards journalists, urban planners, nonprofits, and activist/advocacy work with data. 10/12

A huge thanks to
@laurenfklein bc this work draws extensively from data feminism. Thank you to Paola Ricaurte, @ethanz Stefania Milan, & Annita Lucchesi for their beautiful endorsements. And to Colectiva SJF for permission to use their phenomenal installation for the book cover. 11/12

Want to be community while you read the book? I'm running a free online book club this summer with Data Pop Alliance in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

MORE INFO HERE:

English: https://www.eureka.club/en/register/29
Spanish: https://www.eureka.club/es/register/30
Portuguese: https://www.eureka.club/pt/register/31

12/12

OPEN ACCESS LINK! Here's the direct open access link where you can download chapters and read the whole book for free:
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5767/Counting-FeminicideData-Feminism-in-Action 13/12