Counting Feminicide Explores a New Type of Data Science
While mainstream institutions fail to account and represent for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, Counting Feminicide (MIT Press, 2024) centers data activists ensuring that these killings are counted and envision a future that eliminates the structural inequality driving and abetting feminicide. In Counting Feminicide, Catherine D'Ignazio explores how the efforts of the data activists challenge the prevalent logic of data science, centering care, memory, and justice. “The shift in logic demonstrated by the individuals, researchers, journalists, and organizations working to document and eliminate feminicide opens new opportunities for the potential of restorative or transformative data science,” says D'Ignazio. “That is to say, the use of data science to focus first on healing communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, to envision and work toward the world in which such violence has been eliminated.”
Counting Feminicide and D'Ignazio were recognized as winners of the 2024 American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards in the Women's Studies/Women's Issues category. Launched in 2003, the American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards are one of the largest mainstream book award competitions in the United States. The awards seek to celebrate excellence in the written word by highlighting and uplifting titles and authors across a wide array of themes and genres.
Counting Feminicide builds upon a large-scale collaborative research project, Data Against Feminicide, a collaboration between Isadora Cruxên (MCP ‘16, PhD ‘22), Catherine D'Ignazio, Silvana Fumega, and Helena Suárez Val.
Learn more about Data Against Feminicide
Learn more about the 2023 Best Book Awards and additional winners