A Global Agenda for Feminist Digitality: Critical Reflections on CSW67
Dear Reader,
In March this year, the United Nations will host the 67th session of its annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), with the priority theme of ‘Innovation and Technological change and Education in the Digital Age’. As the multilateral community aims to formally define its political agenda around the crucial intersections of gender and digital technology, we dedicate this issue of DataSyn to a critical engagement with these developments.
In this month’s issue, our pieces address the question of gender-just digitality through various angles: our first piece takes aim at the limited scope of the CSW’s proposed field of discussion and proposes the tenets of more substantive framing. Seeking to critically engage with another key multilateral forum on the horizon, our second piece affirms a charter of feminist demands for the Global Digital Compact. In another essay, we trace the development of the ‘Feminist Digital Justice Declaration for Generation Equality'. We also bring to you a throwback feature for this edition, culling key insights from debates around gendered violence on social media. To top it all, peruse our specially curated Sins & Synergies lounge, showcasing contemporary work from IT for Change on feminist frameworks for the digital.
The DataSyn Team
THE POLICY TABLE
Digital Transformation for Gender Equality: Will ‘Inclusion’ and ‘Diversity’ Alone Get Us There?
Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami
The draft texts that will anchor this year’s CSW discussions position feminist politics around technology in ways that preclude a more systemic and radical challenge to the status quo. Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami develop an overarching critique of this framing and offer a series of recommendations for revitalizing the process and outcomes of CSW67.
Read on.
THE POLICY TABLE
A Global Digital Compact for Gender Equality: Charter of Feminist Demands from the Global South
IT for Change and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
The UN's ambitious 'Global Digital Compact' process kicks off this year. Read this charter of feminist demands from the Global South concerning the UN Global Digital Compact. Built on a series of consultations and dialogues with over 100 feminist academics, scholar-practitioners, activists, civil society representatives, and trade unionists, the charter outlines the normative directions and action agenda for a feminist approach to digital transformation.
Read on.
THE NEW DIVERGENCE
Towards the Construction of a Feminist Digital Justice Agenda: Challenges and Proposals
Salanieta Weleilakeba and Florencia Partenio
What are the key gender priorities for digital governance? What challenges persist in the design and development of platform, data and AI architectures from the standpoint of feminist digital justice? As Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and IT for Change gear up to launch the ‘Feminist Digital Justice Declaration for Generation Equality’ at this year’s CSW meeting, Salanieta Weleilakeba and Florencia Partenio capture the two-year journey and bottom-up civil society process that has led up to this point.
Read on.
THE BIG EXCESS
Feminist Perspectives on Social Media Governance – A Snapshot
Amay Korjan and Avantika Tewari (based on previous work by Anita Gurumurthy, Amshuman Dasarathy, and Avantika Tewari)
In thinking about women’s emancipation in a digital context, one is compelled to address the extreme adversity that gendered online violence on social media creates for women users. In 2022, IT for Change and InternetLab Brazil organized a roundtable that sought to galvanize feminist approaches towards content governance. This article traces some of the valuable insights and critical themes that emerged from the conversation – themes that must be front and center of our larger political agenda.
Read on.
The Sins & Synergies Lounge
At Bot Populi, exploring critical debates around a feminist digitality has been a guiding editorial principle. Check out this special issue on ‘Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet’, that collates analytical pieces on the frontiers of contemporary thinking on gender and technology.
Given the deep gendered inequalities in the distribution of care burdens, welfare institutions end up being a key site for the politics of women’s emancipation to play out, and their digitalization raises a host of new issues and questions around this space. Read Shehla Rashid’s think piece on automated welfare systems in the global south as part of IT for Change’s ‘Re-wiring India's Digitalising Economy for Women's Rights and Well-being’ project.
The toxic gender dynamics that have come increasingly to define the experience of social media for women are in urgent need of systemic and radical intervention. Yet, how are we to conceive of a truly feminist reconfigured alternative framework? Listen to our podcast series that explores feminist imaginations of social media with scholars, activists and leaders from the Global South. You can also check out a synthesis of these conversations here.
Perhaps one of the areas most affected by digitalization is that of labor and the future of work, as mediation by platforms, algorithms and automated processes transform work arrangements. Have a look at IT for Change’s contribution to ‘The Deal we Always Wanted’, a Feminist Action Framework for the Digital Economy.
A throwback to a critical piece that has only grown in relevance, read as Anita Gurmurthy and Nandini Chami tackle the philosophical underpinnings and core political impulses of feminist digital futures in their piece for the Digital New Deal Compendium.
Post-script
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