CREA's work on technology brings together activists, researchers, artists, and human rights practitioners to critically examine digital rights, challenge online power structures, and imagine more just digital futures.

For more than 25 years, CREA has been fighting for gender justice, bodily autonomy, and sexual rights. What was once happening in streets, clinics, and community spaces has increasingly taken shape online — and so have the power structures CREA has always challenged. Technology has never been just another issue for CREA: it is the digital manifestation of the same inequalities we have been addressing for decades.

The internet promised connection and liberation, but for many women and gender-diverse people it has become another space of control, harassment, and exclusion. The same patriarchal systems that operate in physical spaces now work through algorithms, platforms, and AI systems. This is why CREA’s work on technology and AI is not a departure from our core mission but an essential evolution – bringing feminist and queer analysis to bear on the digital spaces where power is increasingly exercised.

How the Work Has Evolved

CREA’s technology institute work began with the Our Voices, Our Futures (OVOF) Tech Deep-Dives – annual virtual institutes for activists, researchers, artists, and human rights practitioners from across the Global South, delivered through the OVOF consortium in partnership with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). Running from 2021 to 2024 and covering themes including misinformation and disinformation, and feminist digital infrastructures for the future, the Deep-Dives built participants' capacity to critically examine digital rights, challenge online power structures, and safely occupy digital spaces. 

The Deep-Dives consistently raised a central question: how do we translate global feminist analysis into sustained local capacity to respond? That question drove CREA to deepen and expand its technology work – towards a full residential institute, advocacy, and a broader programmatic approach.

In October-November 2025, CREA convened its first full residential Institute on technology: the Possible AIs Institute, held in Hong Kong in collaboration with the Digital Narratives Studio and its director Nishant Shah, a long-time collaborator on technology and AI. Bringing together feminist, queer, and decolonial thinkers and practitioners from across the Global South and beyond, the Institute explored three fundamental questions: What would AI look like if built around feminist principles? How do we develop feminist critique to build new technologies rather than just fix broken ones? And how do we take ownership of AI without technologizing our skills and practices? Through invitational dialogues, reflective co-creation, and critical reading, participants built new frameworks for understanding the entanglements of gender, sexuality, disability, and artificial intelligence.

Recent Activities and Milestones

1. OVOF Tech Deep-Dives (2021–2024) – virtual institutes reaching activists and practitioners globally on digital rights, online violence, and platform power
2. Possible AIs Institute, Hong Kong (October–November 2025) – CREA's first full residential technology institute; feminist, queer, and decolonial analysis of AI with participants from across the Global South
3. RECONFERENCE, Kathmandu (2025) – technology as a core theme throughout, structured around three critical actions: RETHINK our relationship with Big Tech and how to hold it accountable; REWORK aspects of digital technology from feminist principles; RECLAIM a more just digital future
4. Platform Accountability Campaign (launched December 2025 at RECONFERENCE) – run in partnership with Point of View and ARISE, demanding accountability from Meta; gathering 306 civil society organisations and 112 individual signatories across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America
5. TFGBV Global Dialogue, Nairobi (2025) – cross-regional convening on technology-facilitated gender-based violence as a global feminist movement issue

Looking Ahead

The work of recent years has positioned CREA at a distinctive intersection of feminist activism and emerging technology. The platform accountability campaign, the Possible AIs Institute, and the conversations at RECONFERENCE have all pointed to the same reality: technology is no longer peripheral to the fight for gender justice – it is central to how power operates in the 21st century. As we look ahead, several critical challenges will demand our attention. Digital platforms are shaping public discourse, access to information, and civic participation across the Global South in ways that continue to reflect deep structural inequalities. Artificial intelligence is reshaping social, political, and economic systems, often reproducing and amplifying existing asymmetries of power. And technology-facilitated gender-based violence remains one of the most urgent and least adequately addressed dimensions of this landscape.

What grounds us is the feminist foundation we have built over 25 years. CREA's approach – intersectional, movement-centred, rooted in the Global South – allows us to move beyond reactive responses and engage these challenges at their systemic roots. Challenging the colonial dynamics that characterise much of platform governance, developing new forms of feminist resistance and digital justice, and ensuring that the voices of those most affected shape the conversations that matter: this is the work ahead.