Feminist reflections on internet policies

The Internet Freedom Festival is refreshingly different from most forums around internet rights and technology - it is almost equal in gender ratio, welcoming of gender non conforming and trans persons, and takes privacy of its participants at the venue seriously. Smita Vanniyar tells us more about their experience at the festival this year in Valencia, Spain.

Prohibition is prohibited: photograph by Smita Vanniyar

When once I registered for the 2017 Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, I was added to a mailing list which had a constant flow of information on the festival and the activities related to it. Even before the schedule came out, the festival sounded fascinating, and distinctly different from other conferences, both national and international, which I have attended as of now.

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'Interpreting the internet: Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America by Elisabeth Jay Friedman looks at a decade long engagement of feminist and women's movements with technology. Alan Finlay reviews the book for GenderIT, and finds it to be essential reading for anyone interested in how feminist (or any) counterpublics are formed and shaped by appropriating whatever technology is available. The book is essential reading for those new to Latin American feminism, and also relevant to feminists seeking to contextualise the work they do online.

Feminists immersed in diverse technologies (collage): Original artwork by Flavia Fascendini

Interpreting the internet: Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America by Elisabeth Jay Friedman is a grounded and well thought-out book.

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While Chelsea Manning has been pardoned by the Obama administration, there are still many political prisoners facing incarceration and lengthy trials for their exercise of freedom of expression and for whistle blowing. Very few countries have enacted laws that protect whistle blowers. Mallory Knodel writes about the benefit fundraiser to welcome home Chelsea Manning that took place at the Internet Freedom Festival 2017 in Valencia, Spain, and reflects on the many others who face similar charges around the world.

For international women’s day, some human rights and technology groups threw a benefit party for Chelsea Manning in Valencia, Spain as part of the annual Internet Freedom Festival. Chelsea Manning is an important activist in internet freedom for using the online platform Wikileaks to inform the world about classified US documents revealing corruption and civilian casualties. She was recently pardoned for blowing the whistle in 2010 on the Iraq War, which then ended in 2011.

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iff_lac.mp3 Jac sm Kee Page type:  In depth

At the Internet Freedom Festival, Jac sm Kee interviews four amazing feminists from Latin America.

• Carla from Brazil, volunteers at Marialab and Vedetas
• Geisa Santos from Periféricas
• Fernanda, also with Marialab and Vedetas
• Nadege, located between Spain and Mexico, and part of Kéfir

They had organised a session at the Internet Freedom Festival titled Gender Inclusive: from the ground to the cloud.

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songexploder75-odesza.mp3 Page type:  Feminist talk

OTT services have become the main entry point to the Internet for most users in the prepaid mobile environment that characterises most African markets. To entice price-sensitive users and to encourage new Internet users, the availability of subsidised data – whether discounted or free – prompts questions of how Internet access and use are affected. Does it enable access to the Internet for first-time users? Does it improve the intensity of use, allowing people to explore the Internet without concerns of cost? Does it lock people into pared-down versions of social networking platforms?

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An interview with Helen Nyinakiiza, who has recently joined Association for Progressive Communication as an individual member. Helen is a passionate digital security trainer, and in this interview she talks about the use of technology and internet rights in Uganda, the digital divide around gender and region, and how she does her trainings.

Helen Nyinakiiza (right), aside from being a digital security trainer, also works in an education project for orphans in Iganga district in Eastern Uganda.

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Online harassment has taken various forms on the internet, including doxxing, intimate violence, stalking and so on. In this article, Part 2 of the series, Maya Ganesh explores a different way of thinking through this contemporary phenomenon by using an approach that emphasises 'design-thinking'. Possibilities that are explored include whether the system or platform can predict or respond to interactions that are escalating. However we also need to acknowledge that design, no matter how good, cannot solve social problems or harassment, but can be part of how we deal with it.

Collage with statute La Pensadora (Thinking Woman) by José Luis Fernández in Spain

The ‘Architectures of Online Harassment’ was the first in a two-part post that described the context and motivations of Tactical Tech’s work addressing the problem of online harassment through the lens of interface design. In this second post, I describe the results and outcomes of the workshop developed by Caroline Sinders and myself.

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We can no longer ignore the pervasive datafication of our lives - the ways in which our habits, illness, abilities, relations are abstracted, and our bodies made into data by an intersecting range of institutions and processes. In this article, the gendered, sexualised and racialised nature of surveillance is unpacked, so we maintain a focus on the power relations involved. Surveillance affects racialised groups, the gender non-conforming, people with disabilities, and other marginalised populations disproportionately.

Original design by Paru Ramesh

The work of caring and writing about sexual surveillance elicits occasional productive puzzlement over its precise meaning. Questions usually boil down to versions of —

• What is sexual surveillance?
• What is sexual about surveillance?
• We are all under surveillance, why make it about _______?
  • ◻ sex?
  • ◻ gender?

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Judith Owigar speaks about her journey entering into tech spaces, and also about their work with Akirachix in Kenya helping other women along the same journey marked by trials, exclusions and success. While speaking about the barriers of education in science and technology (STEM), she says that what inspires her work in many forums around women in tech in Africa, is that eventually a woman should have the space to make her own choices.

Image source: Akirachix

Judith Owigar is a coder, a blogger and a tech enthusiast. She has worked with Akirachix, a revolution for African women and technology. She is a native of Kenya, a country off the coast of East Africa, one of its 40 million inhabitants.

Namita Aavriti: Tell us a bit about yourself, what you are doing now, what motivates you.

Judith Owigar: I studied computer science out of curiosity initially.

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Photograph by Carsten ten Brink. Title: The women work. Image source

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We face a problem when arguing for the economic value of women’s work through discourses of empowerment, inclusion or equality, and this problem is deeper than how it is framed in most development and access to technology discourse. It is based on the fact that only the kind of work done in spaces outside the home are considered to be real work.

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The Distributed Denial of Women strike borrows the metaphor of the DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack as a radical and subversive tool by activists, but currently DDOS attacks powered by zombie-bots are part of the anarcho-capitalist economies of the internet. Ganesh in their article unpacks the many levels at which gendered labour is extracted, and while positing feminist autonomous infrastructures as an alternative, points to the flaws and the contradictions in the movement and civil society as well.

Guy Fawkes Mask Collage
Article triggered by Ganesh

«Stand up for women and non-binary people in tech.
Join the general strike on February 23, 2017.
Pledge to stay home from work, stay offline, and/or publicly protest.»

The Distributed Denial of Women (DDoW) strike is an international call in protest to unequal conditions of women and genderfluid/queer in technology.

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Multinational companies often put in place a policy for diversity and inclusiveness at the workplace, but does this guarantee the everyday, actual practice of accepting people from marginalized communities, and especially women from such communities. In this article, Christina Thomas Dhanaraj, examines what it means to be Dalit in corporate India - the continued invisibilising of caste, sexism and gender inequity and the effectiveness (or not) of diversity policies.

Original image source

“I strongly believe in the movements run by women. If they are truly taken in to confidence, they may change the present picture of society which is very miserable. In the past, they have played a significant role in improving the condition of weaker sections and classes.”
Dr B.R. Ambedkar

Before I delve into my article, I want to provide some context into why and how this is my story.

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Research suggests that women are underrepresented at every level in technology(McKinsey survey, 2016). Why is this the case? And how do we educate, hire, and retain more women in it? In this article, Radhika Radhakrishnan highlights the underlying realities that women face in technology beyond just a numbers game, and offer insight to such questions by interviewing diverse, pioneering women working in various aspects of the field.

Educating Women in Technology

In India, there are gender barriers that uniquely prevent women from accessing technology right from an early age. From an intersectional perspective, such gender barriers overlap with economic, cultural, and class barriers for women from marginalized backgrounds. For women to be creators of technology and decision-makers, we need to first address such barriers so as to not be closed off within the same groups of women who are privileged enough to enter the field.

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