About

As part of her work on the book Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), Catherine D’Ignazio, with Lauren F. Klein, analyzed the lack of reliable official data on femicide as “missing data” and the production of femicide data by activists and civil society organizations as “feminist counterdata.” While working on Data Feminism in 2019, Catherine spent a sabbatical in Buenos Aires and interviewed several organizations working at the intersection of data science and feminist issues, including Silvana Fumega, then Director of Research and Policy at ILDA. When Catherine established the Data + Feminism Lab in 2020, one of the first goals was to create feminist technologies for activist work and to support the production and use of femicide data.

In early 2017, ILDA began an exploratory study to understand how changes in data production and use could contribute to understanding and ultimately combating femicide in Latin America and the Caribbean. ILDA designed an action research methodology to assess the problem, understand how data could contribute to a solution, and establish recommendations for governments in the region. ILDA’s regional data standard on femicide/feminicide, led at the time by Silvana, was initially supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Avina Foundation, and, in its second phase, by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Activist-researcher Helena Suárez Val founded Feminicidio Uruguay in 2015, a project dedicated to monitoring, recording, and mapping cases of femicide in Uruguay. She initially began collecting data as part of a collective effort organized by the Coordinadora de Feminismos del Uruguay to publicly protest, grieve, and make visible the gender-related murders of women in Uruguay. Beginning in 2016, Helena continued the project independently and has since been producing and publishing data on feminicides, attempted feminicides, and other violent deaths of women. She was one of the civil society actors consulted on the first draft of the ILDA femicide data standard. In 2019, Helena was beginning a PhD at the Center for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, focusing her research on the political effects of the circulation of femicide data on social media. One of the objectives of her doctoral proposal was to build a community of practice around femicide data. 

In August 2019, the Catherine, Helena and Silvana met to begin developing ideas for a project that would combine their different approaches to femicide data. Thus, Data Against Feminicide was born . 

In 2023, Isadora Cruxên joined the leadership team. Isadora, currently an associate professor at Queen Mary University of London, is a political economist with an interest in processes of political mobilization and activism, as well as in forms of participatory planning and research. She joined DCF in the summer of 2020 as a student researcher and ended up leading the qualitative analysis of the interviews, in addition to proposing many new ideas for scaling up the project. Between 2021 and 2023, in collaboration with Alessandra Jungs de Almeida, Isadora led the co-design and translation of the DCF tools into Portuguese with Brazilian activists. The DCF project reflects her broader interest in the politics of knowledge and data production as spaces of resistance against extraction and oppression.