Catherine D'Ignazio (US)

A coder, scholar, and artist/designer combining feminism and technology to create more inclusive open spaces, both online and offline.

Catherine D’Ignazio is a hacker mama, scholar, and artist/designer who focuses on feminist technology, data justice and civic engagement.

D’Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab. She has run women’s health 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.

Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her second book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) is an extended case study about grassroots data activism to end gender-related violence.

How does the Living Cities Forum provocation of Common Interests resonate with you and your work?  

Common Interests is a great theme to provoke shared reflection and dialogue about what we hold in common, which rights we all hold, and how we can work to ensure those common interests and rights. As I was preparing my talk, I was reflecting on how our designs so often privilege the "default body" which is a body that is elite, that is white, that is male, that is not disabled and so on. It's a very tiny slice of the population once you start to add up all those privileges into one body! So the question is how do we make spaces and places and systems that work for all the bodies, in all their situations… with a little bit of joy, and fun, and laughter in the process? This question is squarely aligned with the theme of common interests. 

What are some of your favourite projects that have transformed public space – either online or offline?  

One project I discuss in Counting Feminicide is a massive takeover of public space by feminist data activists in Mexico City in 2020. On March 8, 2020 (International Women's Day) a group called Colectiva SJF painted more than two hundred names of women killed in feminicide in the iconic public plaza of the Zócalo. Each name was a meter high and accompanied by signs and slogans and chants that reverberated the words from the ground: “Ni Una Menos,” (Not one woman less) calling the named women back into presence for the collective political body. It was a massive aesthetic takeover of public space. The group produced aerial photographs of the intervention which circulated widely around the world, using aggregations of names to call attention to the state's negligence and the climate of impunity surrounding violence against women.  

In Counting Feminicide, I discuss this project as a way of communicating with data characterized by evocative, embodied, and spatial data visualizations. These aren't often taught in data science and statistics programs but they can be highly effective for raising public consciousness around an urgent political issue. 

Who are some of your greatest influences in work and life?  

I have to say my kids, because my experiences of being pregnant, giving birth, having a miscarriage and an abortion, breastfeeding my babies, and trying to balance caregiving and work have raised my political consciousness in ways I never could have anticipated. Beyond that, I want to do a shoutout to Black feminist thinkers whose work I am grateful for and draw on almost every day: Ida B. Wells, the Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw, among many others.  

What can audiences expect from your upcoming presentation at Living Cities Forum? 

I'll be speaking about default settings – of buildings, of physical systems and of digital systems – and how we can begin to design beyond the defaults. Largely, I'm responding to a prompt from Ruha Benjamin where she invites us to reimagine the default settings of both our technologies and our societies. What might that look like? My talk is one answer.