Welcome to the community review site for Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Thank you for your generosity and time in choosing to read and comment on this manuscript draft. The review period for this draft will close on Dec 29, 2022, although the ability to leave comments will still be available after that point.
I chose to invite community feedback on this draft for several reasons. First, my prior experience with open community review while Lauren Klein and I were drafting Data Feminism was invaluable. Readers were generous – with their critiques, and feedback, and questions, and citations, and copy-edits – in a way that neither of us could have anticipated. These greatly enriched the revision process and led to some significant shifts for us.
Second, this book comes from working in collaboration, community and solidarity with feminicide data activists since 2019. It documents the creative, intellectual and emotional labor of data activists across the Americas and how their approach to data science challenges the hegemonic and extractivist logics of mainstream data science. This is the group to whom I feel the most accountable and for whom I most want to ensure that the work meets its goals around community and solidarity. Thus, I offer this draft especially to the feminicide data community for critique and feedback, so that I may have a chance to learn and grow my thinking and writing before the words on the page are final.
Third, feminists know that knowledge does not come from individual geniuses working in isolation. In writing this book, I draw from my prior collaboration with Lauren on Data Feminism, as well as my current collaboration on Data Against Feminicide – a large, participatory action-research-design project I have been doing with Silvana Fumega (ILDA) and Helena Suárez Val (Feminicidio Uruguay) for the past three years. This is also why I formed an Academic-Community Peer Review Board composed of these collaborators along with several groups that we interviewed and formed relationships with during the project. I am deeply indebted to my collaborators for shaping my thinking and writing to date, and look forward to continuing to learn from their expertise and generous guidance during the review process.
This is a book that aspires to speak to multiple audiences across multiple geographies. These include feminist activists, data activists, data scientists, and software developers as well as public information professionals like librarians and data journalists. Additional audiences include students and scholars from a range of academic fields, including women's and gender studies, urban planning, human computer interaction, Latin American studies, critical race studies, social movement studies, media studies, information science/studies, science and technology studies, and information visualization, among others. Likewise the geographic focus of this book is intentionally broad: feminicide data activism across the Americas, with a particular focus on Latin America where feminist movements have done so much inspiring work to put feminicide on the public agenda. Because of this broad scope, I welcome your help pointing out places that may require additional explanation, where I have missed some crucial context, or where critical concepts are not adequately described.
As I have learned over and over again, your direct and critical words are a generous act and I interpret them as a vote of confidence in my ability to hear and be transformed by them.
Below you will find the complete draft of the manuscript, as well as a code of conduct for commenting. Please feel free to email me – [email protected] – with any comments that you would rather not publicly disclose.
Thank you,
Catherine
Catherine D’Ignazio, Associate Professor of Urban Science & Planning & Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, Dept of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Aerial view of Colectiva SJF's installation of names of victims of feminicide in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s most iconic public space, for International Women's Day 8M 2020. Courtesy of Colectiva SJF. Photo by Santiago Arau.
On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, in 2021, the group Mujeres de Negro Rosario placed 250 empty chairs outside the provicial court building in Rosario to symbolize the 250 women lost to feminicide that year. Courtesy of Mujeres de Negro Rosario.
