“It ain’t a compliment”: Feminist data visualisation and digital street harassment advocacy

Abstract

In an era of datafication, data visualisation is playing an increasing role in civic meaning-making processes. However, the conventions of data visualisation have been criticised for their reductiveness and rhetoric of neutrality and there have been recent efforts to develop feminist principles for designing data visualisations that are compatible with feminist epistemologies. In this article, we aim to examine how data visualisation is used in feminist activism and by feminist activists. Drawing on the example of digital street harassment activism, we analyse how street harassment is visualised in and through a selection of prominent activist social media accounts. We consider the platform affordances utilised by activists, and how these are harnessed in making street harassment ‘knowable'. Moreover, we critically interrogate which and whose experiences are ‘knowable’ via digital techniques, and what remains obscured and silenced. In analysing digital feminist activists’ practices, we argue that what constitutes ‘data visualisation’ itself must be situated within feminist epistemologies and praxis that centre lived experience as the starting point for knowledge production. Such an approach challenges and disrupts normative constructions of what constitutes data visualisation. Our findings demonstrate how feminist activists are adopting ‘traditional’ practices of speaking out and consciousness-raising to the digital sphere in the creation of a range of visualisations that represent the issue of street harassment. We consider the efficacy of these visualisations for achieving their intended purpose and how they might translate to policy and government responses, if this is indeed their goal. Further, we document a tension between feminist epistemologies and the prevailing logic of datafication or dataism and note how in an attempt to unite the two, some digital feminist activism has contributed to reproducing existing power structures, raising concerning implications at the policy level.

Counter-mapping the mobile border: Racial surveillance and data justice in spaces of disappearance

“…Counter-mapping initiatives have the capacity to ‘locate in place phenomena that might have been thought unmappable’ (Popovski and Young, 2023: 7), such as sounds, sensations, or infrastructural arrangements premised on invisibility and disappearance. Recent contributions in this vein use visual, sonic and digital methods (that rely upon web-based geographic information systems such as Google Maps, for example) to study a range of social and cultural changes in different environments, such as patterns in gender-based violence (Fileborn and Trott, 2021), the privatisation and securitisation of ‘public’ space (Tulumello, 2015), and the construction of border walls (Margulies, 2023). As a collaborative project and art work, where are you today succeeds in digitally and sonically mapping the border’s spaces of disappearance at a particular historical juncture, defined by major shifts in the system of immigration detention and the social upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic on the one hand, and by continuities in colonial bordering practices on the other.…”

The politics of data visualisation and policy making

“…One aspect of this debate is how to visualise lived experiences and whether to understand lived experiences as data points or individual stories. Fileborn and Trott (2022) engage with this debate through the topic of street harassment. While it may be possible to quantify the instances of street harassment, this data will not capture the experience of street harassment or its impact on women’s safety.…”

“…The special issue concludes by focusing on data challenges and future practices . This section includes theorisation of how feminist epistemologies disrupt normative constructions of what constitutes data visualisation and a critique of the use of cartographies for mapping street harassment (Fileborn and Trott, 2022). The final contribution reflects on the relationship between data visualisation and ‘seeing’ places and spaces by considering how data visualisation can suggest new political imaginaries for understanding contemporary peace processes (Bell et al, 2022).…”