Note: Registration is now required to join the conversation.
Date and Time: November 17, 3PM – 4:30PM Bangkok time (UTC+7)
Description:
Technology is not neutral, it is shaped by the power structures that prevail in society, how it is designed, accessed, or used is influenced by social structures and systemic inequalities such as gendered discrimination and violence, racialisation, colonialism, class and economic disparities, among others.
A feminist perspective about technology applies a critical lens to question who designs the technology and for whom having at the centre the intersection of such oppressions. Feminist tech aims to advance meaningful access, participation, agency, and empowerment by communities historically excluded, oppressed or discriminated against and groups of people who are also often most impacted by developments in science and technology (indigenous, women, afro-descendant, migrant, refugee, LBTQI, young people, women living in rural communities, people with disabilities, ethnic or religious groups facing marginalisation).
This session with Numun Fund invites everyone to dig deep into feminist approaches to technology, its challenges and opportunities, and to listen and learn from groups on the ground contributing to feminist tech organising in South and Southeast Asia.
There are many questions for us to consider:
- How do you define feminist technology?
- How can civil society organisations adopt feminist technology?
- What does feminist technology mean in the work and context of groups on the ground?
- How can we reimagine the current state of technology and adapt it to better work for our communities?
- What are the challenges in understanding, advocating for, or working on feminist technology?
Guest Speakers:
Syar S Alia, Info & Knowledge Systems Choreographer, Numun Fund. Numun Fund was seeded in June 2020 as the first dedicated fund for feminist tech in, and for the Larger World, aka the Global South. Our aim is to seed and sustain feminist technology infrastructure for movement organising, and we understand digital technologies to be an important part of movement infrastructure. We draw on the breadth and depth of knowledge that already exists in social justice and feminist movements. Numun is the Sumerian word for “seed” and honours the fact that art, music, literature, science, and technology have flourished across the world, and have been led by communities in the Global South throughout history.
Channapatna Health Library (CHL) Collective, from Channapatna, India. It is a collective of women community Health Navigators (HNs), designers and developers who are co-constructing a digital repository of local health experiences and traditional knowledge about wellbeing to facilitate ethical, locally meaningful, and sustainable care work and activism. Our work is enabled through the collaborative building of digital, physical, social and cultural components of a community-owned knowledge infrastructure. CHL currently has about ~200 audio-video items (in the local languages of Kannada and Dakhani) of local health and wellbeing. The HNs engage in collating and curating the library, as well as to enable health knowledge exchange between their communities and local public health actors to educate and activate them with information that is locally rooted and relevant, but is missing from public health information and the global Internet.
Shre Maha and Shalini Selvan from Cybher, Malaysia. Cybher would like a future where women are safe from online gender-based violence (OGBV). Cybher is dedicated to combat online gender-based violence by preventing social media groups from spreading non-consensual intimate images (NCII) that promotes online violence against women and children. The team redirects survivors towards emotional support by empowering women to better protect themselves in online spaces. During the pandemic, the team initially worked on infiltrating the notorious Telegram group called v2k and increase awareness of NCII among social media users. The team is currently available on all social media platforms and reaches out to women whose images have been shared and provides them with sources to support and report the incidents.
This DRAPAC Series talk will be a 90-minute session. A portion of the program will feature the use of Kannada by speakers from CHL, and there will be consecutive interpretation.
