Two seminars on Data Feminism in October

“Data has become a currency of power. The most successful Internet businesses make their money by aggregating data. Decisions of public import, ranging from which products to market, to which prisoners to parole, to which city buildings to inspect, are increasingly being made by automated systems sifting through large amounts of data.” (Interview with Catherine D’Ignazio by Nanna Thylstrup and Kristin Veel, in Women, Gender and Research 1. 2017)

This string of research seminars addresses the growing interest in combining data science and gender and diversity studies as well as the emerging interest in introducing gender and diversity in data science studies. Moreover the seminars reflect the importance and the effect of such methodologies and evidence-based policy making in 21s century which has turned statistics, visualizatons and digital methodologies into key data with wide ranging effects at both the institutional and individual levels. As a result, knowing how to collect, find, analyse, and communicate data is of increasing importance not only in gender and diversity studies, but in general in present-day society. This development has made ownership of data pivotal, along with access to IT equipment, resources, and expertise. Today data is often collected and stored by big corporations and governments, who has the resources and who often control access. People today, as argued by Catherine D’Ignazio, are far more likely to be discriminated against with data or surveilled by data than they are to use data for their own civic ends.

The aims of the seminars are:

• critical aspects of power and inequality in prevailing big data provisions and the current “google world”.
• potentials of online data for alternative or even subversive use and how to apply new technologies of data collection and visualization.
• how bodies may be made visible without creating new essentializing categories
• the potentials and pitfalls of emerging methodologies

In short, the seminars will provide a forum for how provision of new data feed into existing  research practices and ideas of diversity and gender equality? Is it possible to collect and organize data in ways, which support new forms of equality and democratic governance?

Program

The two seminars will present a variety of papers addressing vital conceptual, methodological and practical hands on approaches

11th of October - Data Feminism l

Catherine D’Ignazio
Director of the Data + Feminism Lab and Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Author of the book Data Feminism.

Gillian Rose
Professor at School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University.

Fariba Karimi
team leader in computational social science at the CSH Vienna and assistant professor at the Department of Network and Data Science at CEU. Group Leader at Computational Social Science and Networked Inequality research group.

On the 11th every presentation is expected to be appr. 30 minutes in sessions, that will be conducted in an online format consisting of talks, comments and discussions.

25th of October - Data Feminism ll

Cathrine Hasse, Professor of educational science at DPU, Aarhus University.

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

Analyse og tal

Comments by Samantha Breslin

On the 25th every presentation is expected to be appr. 30 minutes in sessions, that will be conducted at the University og Copenhagen consisting of talks, comments and discussions.