Julia Scher | A History of Surveillance and Security
September 16
Catherine D’Ignazio, a.k.a. kanarinka, is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly as they relate to space and place.
D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run reproductive justice hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise.
With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Since 2019, she has co-organized Data Against Feminicide, a participatory action-research-design project, with Isadora Cruxên, Silvana Fumega and Helena Suárez Val, which includes co-designed AI tools for human rights data activists. D’Ignazio’s 2024 book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press) is an extended case study about this grassroots data activism to end gender-related violence.
Her research at the intersection of technology, design & social justice has been published in Big Data & Society, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of ACM SIGCHI and ACM FAccT. Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org and the Knight Foundation and exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston.