Design Principles For Co-creating Feminist Imaginaries, 2024

Co-written with Eva Duran Sánchez & Sanna Marttila

Abstract

This paper advocates for the potential of feminist participatory practices to create conditions for inclusive and equitable futures. It addresses the need to design for transformative feminist futures and challenges normative innovation spaces. The authors reflect on their experiences organising two feminist hackathons, emphasising intersectionality, equity, and collaboration. They present 11 design principles that guided their efforts, highlighting the importance of centring local grassroots organisations. The paper discusses the potential of these design principles as tools for community engagement, nurturing collective imagination, and normalising feminist practices in collaborative spaces. It emphasises the importance of moving from embodied knowledge to embodying knowledge and integrating values and experiences into the infrastructure of innovation events. The authors acknowledge the challenges in operationalising principles, such as valuing labour and expertise, and raise questions about commitment and responsibility in inclusive, feminist events. This work contributes to the discourse on designing conditions for co-creating feminist imaginaries.

Keywords: feminism, imaginaries, design principles, hackathons

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Workshopping Troubles: Towards Feminist Digital Methods, 2024

Co-written with Jessamy Perriam, Marisa Leavitt Cohn, Michael Hockenhull, Lara Reime, Luis Landa, and Katrine Meldgaard Kjær

Abstract

Digital methods, taken up in the collection and analysis of data, raise concerns around extraction, representation, care, consent, and participation familiar to feminist methodologies. At a feminist STS lab, specialising in digital methods, we convened some workshops to support research design in ongoing projects situated in the Lab’s community, with the aim to articulate feminist principles for digital methods. These projects, working with methods including digital ethnography, database implementation, and machine learning design raise feminist questions around centring care in data collection and participation, navigating hesitancies around extracting data from vulnerable subjects, and working through representational politics of data. These workshops, rather than congealing a set of feminist principles, generated a proliferation of disconcertments and troubles. We offer workshopping troubles as a way to navigate and theorise tensions in designing digital methods research. We account for how these workshops served as a method to elicit troubles, surfacing them for further analysis, and helped us shift from binding dichotomies to troubles that open ongoing inquiry. We reflect on how digital methods return us to troubles that, while well understood in feminist approaches to data, require articulation in practice and research design.

Keywords: feminist digital methods, research design, workshopping, disconcertment, ethnography, science and technology studies

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MA Thesis— Feminist Futures Helsinki Hackathon: Transdisciplinary co-creation of socially engaged projects, 2021

Co-written with Eva Duran Sánchez

Abstract

This transdisciplinary thesis exhibits the potentials found in the intersection between (1) feminism(s), (2) real estate, land use and urban planning, (3) participatory design approaches, and (4) hackathons. In addition, the thesis documents the organisation and execution of a feminist hackathon organised in May 2021 in Helsinki, Finland.

The study consists of a literature review of the four main topics mentioned above, exploring overlaps and contradictions to understand the potential of the union. In addition, a thorough recount and analysis is made of the Feminist Futures Helsinki hackathon (FFH), reflecting on its organisation (before), its unfolding (during) and its impact (after). The study draws from methods from PAR and ethnography such as semi-structured interviews, surveys, ethnographic observations, diagram sketching and case studies. Furthermore, the analysis offers in-depth insights from four of the 12 projects that resulted from the hackathon. Namely, the cases cover topics of inclusion in participatory planning in Helsinki and Lapinlahti, Sámi allyship and age-inclusive participatory communities.

The thesis offers insights into a reflexive journey, where the co-authors explore their own positionality and power within the structures created for the hackathon.

Key takeaways from this work in the context of organising feminist hackathons include: (1) it matters who sets the agenda, (2) it matters who participates, (3) it matters who benefits, (4) processes matter as much as outcomes, and (5) accountability matters.

The co-authors argue for the potential of feminist hackathons to shift public discourse by bringing attention to topics and issues that are otherwise ignored; to encourage educational institutions like universities to rethink partnerships with community organisations; to challenge tech-solutionism. In addition, by centring intersectional feminist values such as accessibility and pursuit of justice, organisers of feminist hackathons will enable more diverse participation.

Keywords: feminism, hackathons, participatory methods, urban planning, real estate, power, equity, futures, sustainability, design justice

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Landscape Report on EdTech in Uganda — for Fingo, 2020

This report was authored in 2020 as a collaboration between Fingo’s Powerbank Project and Aalto University.

Fingo’s Powerbank project was undertaken from 2020 to the end of 2021. Powerbank’s aim was to increase civil society’s capacity in three areas: innovation, technology solutions, and corporate collaboration. The Fingo Powerbank programme extension was financed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.

This report provides a landscape analysis of the digital education technologies scene in Uganda in 2020. Namely, it includes:

i)     A description of the current policies and government initiatives related to social services, specifically education and digital education. 

ii)    A mapping of organisations and startups providing digital education solutions as devices, platforms, or content in Uganda with a focus on pre-school, primary, secondary, university education and professional training for adults. 

iii)  A mapping of the technological infrastructure in Uganda.

iv)  A mapping of key international development programs currently ongoing in Uganda.

v)   A mapping of key hubs supporting the innovation ecosystem in Uganda.