Honorary Mention
Data Against Feminicide is a feminist participatory action research and technology design project. We collaborate with data activists, artists, nonprofits, communities, governments, and journalists who monitor feminicide (or femicide in some contexts).
The project has three main objectives: (1) understanding how activists produce and use data to confront feminicide and other forms of gender-related violence in different contexts; (2) fostering a transnational community of practice and dialogue around the production of feminicide data, and using creative forms of graphic illustration to record and disseminate collectively produced knowledge; and (3) co-designing digital tools using AI and machine learning (ML) to support data production and communication about feminicide.
Photo: Data Against Feminicide
Photo: Data Against Feminicide
Photo: Data Against Feminicide
Photo: Data Against Feminicide
Photo: Data Against Feminicide
Data Against Feminicide does not collect or aggregate data. Rather, we support and sustain the already existing practices of activists, journalists, and citizen data scientists who care for feminicide data in their own contexts. In so doing, we are developing feminist frameworks for AI development that center collectivity, pluralism, care, and contextual specificity.
While we started work in 2019/2020, we achieved major accomplishments starting in 2023:
- AI Co-design process with five Brazilian human rights organizations: We undertook participatory data annotation workshops, design & reflection sessions, and piloted our machine learning models for their feedback and iteration.
- Launch of new co-design process with a human rights group in Kenya (Femicide Count Kenya). This will train a Swahili ML model that will enable human rights groups who work in Swahili to detect and monitor femicide/feminicide.
- Three transnational community meet-up events, each attracting hundreds of registrations and people from more than 35 countries.
- Publication of an award-winning book about the work – Counting Feminicide from MIT Press. Open access, community review process.
Credits
Lead organizers who set the vision for the project, organize collaborations and events, lead co-design processes:
Isadora Cruxên (Queen Mary University, London, UK), Catherine D’Ignazio (MIT, USA), Silvana Fumega (Independent Consultant, Argentina), Helena Suárez Val (Feminicidio Uruguay)
Partners who provide technical and infrastructural support:
Rahul Bhargava (Northeastern University), MediaCloud, The Latin American Initiative for Open Data (ILDA), Jimena Acosta (Curator, Mexico City), Red Interamericana Anti-femicidio, DISCO Lab at Brown University
Collaborators who comprise our community, help to run annual events, and co-design AI technologies with us:
Sovereign Bodies Institute – SBI (USA), African American Policy Forum (USA), Women Count USA, Black Femicide US (USA), Observatorio Nacional MuMaLá (Argentina), Mujeres de Negro Rosario (Argentina), Feminicidio.net (Spain), Néias – Observatório de Feminicídios Londrina (Brazil), Fórum Cearense de Mulheres – FCM (Brazil), Lupa Feminista contra o Feminicídio – Coletivo Feminino Plural (Brazil), Laboratório de Estudos de Feminicídios – LESFEM (Brazil), Grupo de Trabalho sobre Feminicídio na Bahia – GT FEM (Brazil), Femicide Count Kenya (Kenya)
Students & alumni who have contributed to this work:
Natasha Ansari, Amelia Dogan, Alessandra Jungs de Almeida, Patricia Michelle García Iruegas, Mariel García-Montes, Soyoun Kang, Niki Karanikola, Ana Amelia Letelier, Angeles Martinez Cuba, Rajiv Movva, Valentina Pedroza Muñoz, Tiandra Ray, Luciana Ribeiro da Silva, Wonyoung So, Harini Suresh, Melissa Q. Teng, Thuận Tran
Translators and interpreters who support the multilingual project:
Patricia Antuña, Ana Barreiro, Marise Carvalho, Mariana Fagundez
Illustrator: Sofía Donner
With support from: The Latin American Initiative for Open Data (ILDA); MIT Department of Urban Studies & Planning; The National Science Foundation (USA);
School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL)
Biography
Isadora Cruxên (GB) is a lecturer in Business and Society at Queen Mary University of London whose work focuses on processes of political mobilization and explores participatory methods of research and planning.
Catherine D’Ignazio (US) is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT where she is the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab.
Silvana Fumega (AR) is a professional with 20 years of experience, having worked in areas ranging from access to public information, data and global measurements, always with a strong focus on gender and inclusion.
Helena Suárez Val (UY) is an activist, researcher, and producer, focused on digital communication strategies and cultural events in the areas of human rights and feminism. She is the creator of the ongoing activist project Feminicidio Uruguay. feminicidiouruguay.net.
Jury Statement
While data shapes our institutions and decisions, gender-based violence remains tragically underreported, misclassified, or ignored. Data Against Feminicide responds to this silence with care and urgency. Founded by Isadora Cruxên, Catherine D’Ignazio, Silvana Fumega, and Helena Suárez Val, the project supports activists who transform missing statistics into feminist counterdata—naming lives erased by institutional neglect. Through ethical tools, shared standards, and global collaboration, it creates a network where stories, not just numbers, matter. Bridging civic tech, activism, and memory, the project reclaims data not as extraction, but as connection—a way to mourn, to resist, and to insist that every life counts.