The prevalence of murder of women by men, across the world, is beyond dispute. The phenomenon - the murder of women because they are women - has become such a fixture of human life that it has acquired a name: femicide, or feminicide.

While criminal justice systems are kept busy processing feminicide; whole media genres are dedicated to telling the stories of feminicide; untold governmental agencies and NGOs report on the general state of feminicide - the fact remains that no government, no country in the world actually keeps statistics on feminicide.

In this episode, Elle speaks with data analyst, author and director of the Data+Feminism Lab at MIT, Catherine D’Ignazio about her new book Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Catherine’s book tells the story of the people, mostly across the Americas, who decided to pick up the job of counting women killed, independently and unpaid, and how they have turned this work into a powerful activist movement.

We talk about revolutionizing data science, examining and challenging power through data activism, why governments are willfully blind to femicide, what can be learned from anti-femicide movements in Latin and South America, understanding feminicide as a large-scale pattern beyond the “isolated incident” model, and how women’s risk of murder is connected to the devalued status of women.

Episode Links

Join free book club for Counting Feminicide from now thru Aug 31, 2024.

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Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness