The Data + Feminism Lab hosts Joana Varon

Speculative TransFeminist Futures: from imagination to action
From consent to profound debates around intersectionalities, feminist theories and approaches to daily life have a lot to guide us towards developing technologies that might help us to expose power imbalances and promote human rights and social justice. After a brief presentation about the work that Coding Rights has been doing towards materializing this bigger assumption, our gathering will be a group discussion to collectively brainstorm different paths to start envisioning transfeminist technologies to help us craft better futures.

About Joana Varon
Joana is Executive Directress and Creative Chaos Catalyst at Coding Rights, a women-run organization working to expose and redress the power imbalances built into technology and its application, particularly those that reinforce gender and North/South inequalities. Current affiliate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and former Mozilla Media Fellow, she is co-creator of several creative projects operating in the interplay between law, arts and technologies, such as transfeministech.org, chupadados.com, #safersisters, protestos.org and freenetfilm.org. Brazilian, with Colombian ancestry, she is engaged in several privacy and security networks, such as Privacy International Network, the feminist hackers collective DeepLab and the Advisory Council of Open Technology Fund, always focused on bringing Latin American perspectives in the search of feminist techno-political frameworks for design and usages of technologies.

About the Data + Feminism Lab
The Data + Feminism Lab uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly as they relate to space and place. Our work is based on the intersectional approach outlined in Data Feminism (D'Ignazio & Klein, MIT Press, 2020). This approach includes analyzing power against the backdrop of the "matrix of domination" (Collins, 2000), valuing lived experience, committing to co-liberation, and using participatory methods of co-design and knowledge production. We are proud members of the Design Justice Network. The Data + Feminism Lab is based in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and directed by Catherine D'Ignazio.