Seminar: Catherine D’Ignazio on Data Feminism in Action

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT is excited to welcome Dr. Catherine D’Ignazio for a talk on data, AI, and power.

As data and AI are increasingly mobilized in the service of global corporations, governments, and elite institutions, their unequal conditions of production, their inequitable impacts, and their asymmetrical silences become increasingly more apparent. It is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? AI for whom? In whose interest? Informed by whose values?” And most importantly, “How do we begin to imagine alternatives for data’s collection, analysis, and communication?” These are some of the questions that emerge from what Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio call Data Feminism (MIT Press 2020). In this talk, D’Ignazio will present the data feminism principles, along with recent work from her most recent book, Counting Feminicide (MIT Press 2024). Drawing from a large-scale participatory action research project, she will describe how data activists and journalists enact alternative epistemological approaches to data science that center care, memory and justice. These informatic practices constitute a form of “epistemic disobedience” to the reigning logics of AI and data science. This talk, and the book that it draws from, make the case that grassroots data activists and journalists, predominantly from Latin America, are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account.

Catherine D’Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab.

Please contact Learning and Events Coordinator Claire Sadar if you are interested in attending.