Technology as Political Resistance
Technologies of Resistance: Towards Feminist Futures Panel Series
The graduate students from nine universities of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality originally organized an interdisciplinary symposium titled "Technologies of resistance: towards feminist futures" to be held at MIT on April 4, 2020. Due to COVID-19 and campus closures, this event was reimagined as four separate panels to be held remotely.
This panel will discuss how media and technology is deployed, negotiated and redressed in activism. Engaging technologies such as hackathon, civic media, data and computation, the panelists will share their stories of making technology work for feminism, freedom, and justice.
Speakers include:
Alexis Hope, Designer and Researcher, MIT Media Lab
Alexis Hope is a designer and researcher based at the MIT Media Lab, MIT Center for Civic Media, and the Massachusetts College of Art department of Industrial Design. As part of her work at MIT, she developed FOLD, an open publishing platform that helps people and organizations tell complex stories in a visually striking way.
Before coming to MIT, Alexis focused on designing technology for global health alongside healthcare practitioners in resource-constrained environments. At the University of Washington, she led a project to develop a portable, low-cost ultrasound machine for midwives in Kenya, Uganda, and Seattle. Alexis was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow from 2012 - 2015, focusing on bringing human-centered and participatory research methods to technology design. As part of her commitment to participatory design, she helps organize unique hackathons and civic technology workshops around the world.
Lü Pin, Feminist Voices
Lü Pin (吕频) is a Chinese feminist activist focusing on strategic advocacy to combat gender-based discrimination and violence. She started her work on women’s rights in the late 1990s. In 2009, she founded Feminist Voices, China’s largest new media platform on women’s issues. Since 2012, she has been devoted to supporting the activism of young feminists across China. She now resides in Albany, New York, where she continues to follow the feminist movement in China closely.
Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning, MIT
Catherine D’Ignazio is a hacker mama, scholar, and artist/designer who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run women’s health hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her 2020 MIT Press book, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT where she is the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab.
Vanessa Rhinesmith, Strategy and Programs Lead, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry
Vanessa Rhinesmith is the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Programs at UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She has spent her career working with a variety of public and private organizations through a range of positions and industries. She has led projects, improved programs, enhanced organizations, and strengthened cultural dynamics all through an approach to work that is built on a foundation of participatory inquiry, community collaboration, and trust. Vanessa has an MBA from Simmons School of Management (MA), BA in Marketing from Fairfield University (CT), and worked as a social worker in Chicago. Vanessa is currently exploring feminist approaches to cyber security and the role of history, narrative, and power in the creation of sex trafficking policy. She lives with her husband, daughter, two cats and dog.