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June 30, 2024
Mapping The Murder Of Women
The prevalence of murder of women by men, across the world, is beyond dispute. The phenomenon - the murder of women because they are women - has become such a fixture of human life that it has acquired a name: femicide, or feminicide.
While criminal justice systems are kept busy processing feminicide; whole media genres are dedicated to telling the stories of feminicide; untold governmental agencies and NGOs report on the general state of feminicide - the fact remains that no government, no country in the world actually keeps statistics on feminicide.
In this episode, Elle speaks with data analyst, author and director of the Data+Feminism Lab at MIT, Catherine D’Ignazio about her new book Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Catherine’s book tells the story of the people, mostly across the Americas, who decided to pick up the job of counting women killed, independently and unpaid, and how they have turned this work into a powerful activist movement.
We talk about revolutionizing data science, examining and challenging power through data activism, why governments are willfully blind to femicide, what can be learned from anti-femicide movements in Latin and South America, understanding feminicide as a large-scale pattern beyond the “isolated incident” model, and how women’s risk of murder is connected to the devalued status of women.
Episode Links
Join free book club for Counting Feminicide from now thru Aug 31, 2024.
Contact Us
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
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Twitter: @SubjectToPower
Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Catherine D'Ignazio
Data Analyst, Author & Director of the Data+Feminism Lab at MIT
Catherine D’Ignazio is a hacker mama, scholar, artist and designer who focuses on feminist technology, data justice 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 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her second book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) is an extended case study about grassroots data activism to end gender-related violence.
D’Ignazio is an Associate 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.