This paper looks at current struggles and transformations on the meanings of online violence in Brazil. It interrogates how feminist research and interventions in digital technologies with regards to online violence against LGTQIA+ in the contemporary political scenario. Responses to online hate speech as political violence shed new light on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and gender expression at its basis.

This paper analyzes some developments of an action research project cultivated with the quilombolas residents from Ribeirão Grande/Terra Seca, which aimed at initiating a community network with an organization of women farmers to help foster their agroecological product sales. The essay begins contextualizing the quilombos, the actors involved in the project, as well as their political and methodological perspectives. Then it analyzes some positive and negative aspects of the project, and reflects on the importance of considering gender, race and colonialism as axes of oppressions present during community networks building. We share these reflections hoping that it can be useful for other community network activists, advocates and groups when it comes to their technological practices and methodologies in distinct territories.

The Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) Women’s Rights Programme’s knowledge building strategic team conducted a meta-research project that focused on the methodological processes and ethical practices of the eight research projects implemented as part of the FIRN project. Meta-research is the study of research, including its methods and how research is reported and evaluated, in order to understand and improve upon research and research processes.

As part of the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) project, supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), this white paper aims to assess feminist internet research in relation to internet governance and policy, with a particular focus on scholarship in the global South.

Platformization of domestic and personal services work has changed how tech forward, urban middle- and upper-class customers find workers, but it has changed little about the dynamic of the work being conducted. Continuing to use a feminist lens, we narrow our focus down to the app design and consider the interface and context of platfomised work.

We illuminate the values encoded in the interfaces created in platform-based domestic work, and highlight the power structures they uphold and break away from. The report is a result of our investigation at how workers navigate the rules and restrictions placed on them by the app's design and company policies. Using the Urban Company app as a case study, we show how platform design affects working conditions for workers.

In Malaysia, and to some extent, globally, gender inequality is often and rightly addressed in terms of GBV and gender discriminatory impacts. However, the impact of gender inequality in relation to freedom of opinion and expression is largely unaddressed. A framework for an unrestrained freedom of opinion and expression means very little to women if it ignores the inherent unequal power dynamics in our access to human rights and equal protection under the law.

The internet played a key role in the stormy anti-gender rights backlash in Bulgaria, after the heated campaign against the ratification of the Istanbul Convention in 2018.

Gender-phobic hate speech was generated largely on social media, mostly on Facebook, as well as on some popular news sites. This has had a double negative effect. First, it crucially amplified negative public attitudes against gender rights. And second, the proliferation of hateful rhetoric incited online gender-based violence (GBV) in itself.

Jair Bolsonaro's election as president of Brazil in 2018 capitalised on moral panics towards feminism and minority rights. Articulating gender, sexual difference, race and class, that hostility was increasingly felt on online digital networks. This research addresses the role of social media use and architecture in the production and dissemination of hate speech and anti-rights discourse as a fundamental aspect of the current right turn in Brazilian politics. In that context, it also explores emergent feminist and LGBT intersectional responses and struggles to define online violence. 

Throughout the Latin American region, governments are in the process of testing and piloting a wide variety of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to deploy public services. But what are the feminist and human rights implications?

As machines are designed and operated by the very same humans in power, these AI systems are mostly likely to cause or propagate harm and discrimination based on gender and all its intersectionalities of race, class, sexuality, age, territoriality, etc., therefore posing worrisome trends that should be of concern to feminist movements.

This action-research project envisages the implementation of a Wi-Fi community network in the Terra Seca quilombo community in the Vale do Ribeira region of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, while conducting a participatory research process on information and communication technologies, more specifically community networks, through an intersectional feminist lens.