Session Chair: Natalie Ann Hendry
Presentation 1
"I Made Myself a New Safety Bubble": Building Trans Virtual Homeplace
Vilja Aura Minerva Jaaksi
University of Turku, Finland
The internet can feel like a hostile place, especially for trans users. Transphobic harassment and discourse are ubiquitous (Colliver 2023), and the public-by-default (boyd 2010) structure of many platforms makes it difficult to create spaces away from this hostility, when boundaries of these spaces remain porous, and content leaks both in and out. This paper explores the practices of boundary work Finnish nonbinary and trans social media users engage in to create _trans virtual homeplaces_ (hooks 2014; Lee 2015) in response to this hostility. I take the concept of _homeplace_ from bell hooks (2014), who has used it to describe the home as a safe space created by black women where people can come together to resist and recover, away from the surrounding racist society. Expanding on the concept of _virtual homepace_ (Lee 2015), this paper further examines what it means to make a homeplace virtual, exploring the shift from family and friends to looser networked publics (boyd 2011), and from the material space of the home to digital spaces. The analysis draws from 18 diary-interviews with Finnish nonbinary and trans social media users, which focused on everyday social media use. This paper further focuses on interview segments where participants used the terms “safe space” and “bubble”, sometimes as the compound term “safety bubble.” I use the concept of homeplace to make sense of these intertwined discourses, tracing the practices filtering to create bubbles that function as homeplaces, and the messy negotiation of safety when forming these spaces.
Presentation 2
HISTORICISING FEMINIST DATA ACTIVISM: A MEDIA GENEALOGY OF THE WOMEN’S SAFETY AUDITS
Trang Le
Monash University, Australia
This paper historicizes feminist data activism, particularly as it relates to the use of grassroots data by feminist activists to address gendered violence in public spaces. It seeks to address the following question: How did grassroots data become widely accepted as a legitimate means to combat gendered violence in public spaces? This historical perspective allows us to unpack what seems to be a novel action repertoire within contemporary feminist activism.
I use media genealogy to trace the history of a particular grassroots data type: the Women's Safety Audit (WSA). The data for this study come from historical records published by the feminist organisation that pioneered the WSA and different UN agencies, spanning four decades since the emergence of the WSA in the 1980s (n=41). I also drew upon modern data initiatives' documents and interviews with data activists and stakeholders who funded data activism efforts.
This paper reveals three significant forces that have shaped the WSA and how it came to be accepted as a means to address gendered violence in public spaces: the Crime Prevention through Environmental Design approach, the dominance of evidence-based practices, and the imperative of scalability. Rather than signalling the emergence of innovative epistemic cultures as some scholars suggest, this genealogy of the WSA showed that grassroots data approach has indeed been folded into other hegemonic interests throughout the history. Grappling with this entanglement and the hierarchy of power/knowledge it enacts is crucial for feminist activism to not reproduce the power relations they seek to address.
Presentation 3
Queer digital lives: Understanding datafication through creative collaborative approaches
Liv Owens, Lily Bichard-Collins, Elisabetta Ferrari
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Grounded in a participatory action research (PAR) framework, this project examines how queer individuals experience datafication and surveillance in their daily lives and respond to it. Building on existing literature on both datafication and LGBTQ+ digital practices, we address the tensions around visibility, invisibility and hypervisibility that emerge in queer people’s encounters with the datafied gaze. The research is based on three focus groups and a zine-making workshop, conducted with a small group of LGBTQ+ participants in Glasgow (UK) and involving different creative and participatory activities. We find that participants are aware of the amount of data that is collected about them, and they think that ‘opting out’ is largely unrealistic; they remark on how much this data collection renders them heavily visible online and specifically visible as queer. They highlight two paradoxes: first, that the enactment of safety policies by corporate digital platforms renders queer communities more visible, but not safer; second, that these platforms are sites for the development of queer knowledge but are also extracting it. Further, participants explain the tactics of invisibility they adopt to set boundaries to protect themselves; while they had not previously necessarily thought of them as responding to datafication, they became aware of this connection by participating in our research. Lastly, participants’ experiences show how knowledge about visibility and invisibility circulates within queer communities, leading to mutual learning. By adopting a PAR approach, our project not only documents participants’ experiences but also invites them to co-create empowering knowledge about datafication and surveillance.
Presentation 4
One Swipe at a Time: Indian Women’s Experience of Safety by Design on Bumble
Benson Rajan
QUT, Australia
Bumble, a dating app that positions itself as feminist and safe for women in India, has failed to live up to its claims. Despite its promotion of a safety-by-design approach, users have not fully embraced the app's safety features. This suggests a lack of understanding of the cultural factors contributing to the risks associated with online dating in India. To investigate women's experiences with Bumble’s safety features and their efforts to ensure their own safety while using dating platforms, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 23 women who are Bumble users in India. The preliminary findings indicate that using Bumble requires additional “safety work” from women, who rely on support from their peer network to manage their safety. The notion of safety by design has been misleading, as power dynamics shift back to men after women make the first move. This study is important to understand how profit-driven platforms with neo-liberal agendas put women in danger within their local cultural context on the pretext of empowering them.
