Reading List: Intersectional Data and Technology

The Afro Feminist Data Futures project explores how Feminist Movements in Africa use data to better understand how they can be empowered through the production, sharing, and use of gender data, and translated into actionable recommendations for private technology companies.

FRIDA is a feminist fund run by young feminists to support and establish other emerging feminist organisations, collectives and movements. Noting the patriarchal nature of tech platforms, FRIDA is creating its own safe, autonomous, feminist digital spaces.

The Consentful Tech Project raises awareness and shares skills and strategies to help people build and use technology consentfully. Consentful technologies are built with consent at their core, and support the self-determination of people who use and are affected by these technologies.

The Feminist Principles of the Internet are a set of statements that together provide a framework for women’s movements to articulate and explore issues related to technology. They offer a gender and sexual rights lens on critical internet-related rights.

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble critiques search engines like Google for bias, arguing that their algorithms, shaped by private interests and monopolies, lease to a biased set of algorithms privilege whiteness and marginalise people of colour, especially women.

In Unmasking AI, Buolamwini applies an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, to show how racism, sexism, colourism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools.

The Cyberfeminism Index is a collection of resources for techno-critical works from 1990–2020, gathered and facilitated by Mindy Seu. In the Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.

In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin explores how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era.

The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics informed by intersectional feminism. Data feminism is about power and how power differentials can be challenged and changed.

Did you know that most facial recognition technology is trained only to recognise lighter skin tones?  Meredith Broussard in More Than a Glitch explores how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable.

In Consent to our Data Bodies lessons from feminist theories to enforce data protection, Paz Peña and Joana Varon explore how feminist views and theories on sexual consent can feed the data protection debate.

In Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Cathy O’Neil reveals that mathematical models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and incontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination, creating a toxic cocktail for democracy.

Automated systems control which neighbourhoods get policed, which families get needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in the United States.

What does fairness look like when computers shape decision-making? Can AI be created by and for low-income and communities of colour? A People’s Guide To Tech breaks down and contextualises artificial intelligence technologies within structural racism and discusses alternate futures for AI.

In attempting to envision AI systems that are emancipatory and liberatory to all peoples, Principles of Afro-feminist AI Data, follows the afro-feminist approach in its inquiry and the propositions it puts forward. Afro-feminism seeks to create its own theories that are linked to the diversity of the realities of African women as a way of challenging all forms of domination they encounter particularly as they relate to patriarchy, race, sexuality and global imperialism.