Geographies of missing data
After four years in the works, we are thrilled to announce the publication of our paper Geographies of missing data: Spatializing counterdata production against feminicide, co-authored by Catherine D'Ignazio (she/ella), Isadora Cruxên, Angeles Martinez Cuba, Helena Suárez Val, Amelia Dogan and Natasha Ansari. The article is open access and published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
The paper bridges scholarship in feminist and information geographies with data feminism to examine the ways in which space, broadly defined, shapes the counterdata production strategies of feminicide data activists.
This work comes out of the Data Against Feminicide project — we have been working with data activists and co-creating community spaces since 2019. For this paper, we interviewed 33 monitoring efforts led by civil society orgs across 15 countries, primarily in Latin America.
Our article builds on work about “missing data” to show that there are spatial dimensions to where information about feminicide goes unrecorded, producing geographies of missing data. In response, activists engage in counterdata production. This is not (only) about counting or filling in gaps for the state but also for memory, healing, and social transformation.
We outline four ways that activists spatialize their counterdata: reach, emplace, reclaim and cruzar.
(1) reach — activists use spatialized monitoring and governance structures to learn about feminicide in rural and remote territories.
(2) emplace — the careful collection and analysis of geographic information at the scale of the individual case of feminicide. This permits activists to more deeply examine power.
(3) reclaim — using spatial strategies to link individual cases together and to demand collective memory justice.
(4) cruzar (crossing) — to build transnational networks of solidarity with other data activists.
With this article, we extend an invitation to critical data studies to more deeply engage with the spatial politics of data and information. These are intimately bound together in both the geographies of missing data about feminicide and activist strategies to challenge them.
Read the whole article here.
