Event report - Making Meaning: Feminist conversations on research as resistance, hope and transformation
This event report captured discussion and reflection during the 3-day symposium, "Making Meaning: Feminist conversations on research as resistance, hope and transformation", co-organised by the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) and Resistance and Resilience (R&R).
In April 2026, the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) and Resistance and Resilience (R&R) research projects co-organised a 3-day symposium to bring together their research partners working at the intersections of feminist research and technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). This cross-programmatic event sought to contribute to feminist and decolonial digital rights movements. The research projects were supported by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
The event celebrated achievements made in both projects, facilitated collaborative knowledge building and provided space for learning and reflections within the shared digital infrastructure, colonial power relations and structural inequalities that shape tech-facilitated violence and social and environmental injustice. By bringing together partners, researchers, academics and activists across movements, the symposium sought to build collective insights for coherent counter-narratives necessary for effective policy, rights advocacy and strategic organising to resist multiple and overlapping oppressions worldwide.
About the event report
The symposium was structured across three days, each with a distinct thematic focus. The first day (Undoing Power) centred participation in methodology as a feminist and decolonial practice. The second day (Unpacking Intersectionality) reframed and expanded understandings of violence through a critical lens of the limitations of conventional frameworks of TFGBV research. The final day (Resistance and Refusal) explored disassociation as engagement and response in opposition of Global North framings of such work. The sessions were facilitated by Christy Alves Nascimento, who warmly held space for panellists and researchers to reflect on the purpose and implications of their work.
This event documentation is organised into four parts:
- Part 1: Undoing power
- Part 2: At the intersections
- Part 3: Refusal as resistance
- Postscript: Witnessing the witnessers