technology

Till I was 17, I did not have a word for who I was, or could be. I did not know I was a transgender girl. But as a 16-year-old, I discovered the internet.” Nadika, The Smartphone Freed Me

The Our Voices, Our Futures (OVOF) Tech Deep-dive is a three-day mini-Institute conducted virtually for activists, researchers, artists and other human rights practitioners from around the world. We link theory to practice and foreground queer theory and feminist theory. We use global South examples, case studies and perspectives as much as possible. The goal is for participants to understand and critique, as well as to occupy and expand digital spaces for democratic engagement.

The Deep-dive was realized due to OVOF’s belief that feminists, communities and structurally silenced women and people should

• Participate in the creation of digital technologies
• Make collective decisions regarding their governance
• Be able to safely and securely make interventions to:
  • interrupt dominant discourse
  • subvert power structures
  • challenge private ownership and state over-regulation of public online space
  • demand accountability.

Participants receive feminist frameworks and tools with which they can:

• Critically examine their own advocacy and rights-based claims in relation to online space and digital rights
• Interrogate and untangle their assumptions and strategies
• Unpack and recast their relationship with digital technologies.

The Deep-dive is hosted by the global South feminist-led OVOF consortium which is dedicated to amplifying the voices of structurally silenced women and people in all domains of civic space, including online space. It is co-created and conducted by CREA and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). This Deep-dive first began in 2021, and focused on misinformation/disinformation. In its second iteration, the Deep-dive focused on feminist digital technological infrastructures for the future.

After each Deep-dive, we continuously engage with the alumni to measure and capture the impact of the Deep-dive in their lives and work, as well as to guide our planning of future sessions. We plan to continue engaging with alumni to create a robust community of changemakers working on transforming digital spaces.

CREA’s first full-fledged Institute on technology, titled ‘Possible AIs: Institute for Speculative Technologies’, is scheduled to be held from 31 October to 6 November, 2025 in Hong Kong. Held in collaboration with the Digital Narratives Studio, this pilot Institute will explore possible AIs to demystify AI, trace its histories, re-create it and open the door to imagining other kinds of AI based on feminist principles and values. Through feminist and queer pedagogies, invitational dialogues, reflective co-creation, and critical reading and thinking, we propose new ways by which to understand the entanglements of gender, sexuality and AI.