Helena Suárez Val: Strategic Datafication and Feminicide in Latin America
The center will host a talk by the activist researcher Helena Suárez Val on the activist production of feminicide data in Latin America as a political strategy that mobilises a practice of ‘strategic essentialism’.
Info about event
Time
Location
Online event
Strategic datafication and feminicide in Latin America
In Latin America, the activist production of feminicide data is a political strategy. I propose calling this practice strategic datification, drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1984) notion of strategic essentialism. By producing data, activists are deliberately engaging with the dominant logic of data-driven rationality—what José van Dijck (2014) terms the datification paradigm—to represent and assert a version of truth about an issue that deeply matters.
But how does this strategy align with critiques that view data as a technology of vision and surveillance, historically entangled with imperialism, colonialism, the military-industrial complex, capitalism, and masculine cultural norms (Leurs, 2017, p. 150)?
In this presentation, I explore how activists use datafication in response to feminicide. This includes creating data about the lives of women and girls affected by gender-based violence, as well as about perpetrators and communities. By doing so, they harness the legitimising power of data to push for social change—while remaining critically aware of how data can also reinforce the very systems they seek to dismantle. Crucially, their work insists on one vital point: women are not data.
Helena Suárez Val is an activist researcher working at the junction of feminism and technology. She leads Feminicidio Uruguay (feminicidiouruguay.net), a project dedicated to monitoring, recording, and mapping cases of feminicide in that country, and co-leads Data Against Feminicide (datoscontrafeminicidio.net), an international participatory action research project that explores and supports activist engagements with data to end gender-related violence. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick and an MA in Gender, Media and Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research traverses digital humanities, STS, and media studies. Professionally, she has an extensive career in web development and digital communications for human rights in international and local NGOs. She is a member of Uruguay’s National System of Researchers (SNI).