Purple Code

What is participatory research, and how hard is it to navigate disciplines like sociology and computer science at the same time? Dr. Milagros Miceli – a sociologist and a computer scientist – is from Argentina and currently based in Berlin. Her research on data work is widely known to provide rich empirical evidence on the abysmal working conditions of click workers and content moderators in Germany, Argentina, Syria, Kenya and Bulgaria. Milagros leads the research group ‘Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics’ at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. She is also a research fellow at the DAIR Institute, where she is currently investigating ways to engage communities of data workers in AI research. 

This episode with Milagros takes us on a journey of her love for her work, but also the struggles that it brings along. She goes on to talk about issues like credibility, acceptance and recognition as a pioneering researcher in a field that is finally getting the attention it deserves, but at the cost of balancing it as a woman, migrant, and mother of two.

Milagros on Twitter

Our summer break episode is a special one: Helena Mihaljević, mathematician and professor for computer science, talks about her fascination for math, chess and boxing; about her migration history; about training data that are so deeply rooted in our culture and history. Helena elaborates why math is not neutral, how she experiences improvements in the tech industry, and her involvement in an ongoing study of the gender gap in different sciences and regions. Listen to our conversation on how to empower young women to be confident in tech jobs, and how we should have tech companies and technology audits that are contextual and participative, carried out together with advocacy organizations and researchers.

Helena on Twitter @h_mihaljevic

Helena @HTW

Meera Ghani is a human rights and climate activist from Pakistan, based in Belgium. In this episode we talk about many forms of violence against feminist, environmental and digital rights activists in Pakistan and in the West, which are often amplified by digital technologies.  Meera shares with us her vision of a culture of care as an antidote to online and offline violence. Meera explains why it is important that organizations take measures that go beyond merely preserving the functioning of their members and employees; and that organizations instead should strive for care in a serious way. However, cultures of care demand transparency about power relations and a redistribution of power – which finds much resistance in practice, in Meera’s and our experience. 

Meera Ghani on Twitter: @MeeraGhani

We talk about Renata’s experiences as a human rights lawyer and her work with regards to massive human rights violations of indigenous people in Latin America. She elaborates on the potentials of technology when in the hands of people and how she dealt with testimony material and archives, with hours and hours of testimonies. The impermanence of the human rights internet and the lack of support of archives when we discuss human rights violations is one central moment in this episode: many of the websites are gone, many of the documentation about human rights abuses and the battle for accountability vanished. Renata elaborates on the accessibility of relevant material for the public interest and the anachronic copyright laws and restrictions due to geo-location and geographic restrictions.

Renata Ávila on Twitter: @avilarenata

Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer is a Brooklyn native and a long-term Berlin resident with a background in digital transformation and social entrepreneurship. In this episode, Nakeema shares many insights into decades of experience in the tech sector. Her work spans from years of research in North Africa and the Middle East to operating in the tech sector in New York, Toronto and Boston. In Berlin, she founded “FrauenLoop”, an NGO that trains women-identified persons in computer programming and offers a diverse network for women from all different backgrounds to build a lasting career in tech. Nakeema takes us back to the beginnings of FrauenLoop and elaborates why she started this program. In her work as a decolonial researcher, questions of women and diversity in tech and how to address the marginalization of especially female immigrants and refugees in the tech industry are central. This conversation raises many new questions and informs our very discussions on systems of oppression and digital technologies.

Nakeema Stefflbauer on Twitter: @DocStefflbauer

Rukhsana* is a queer software developer and poet who recently moved to Berlin. In this episode, Rukhsana talks about her journey in designing software, coming from South Asia and the particularities of power during the migration process. She talks about how she has managed to take space – both by chance and by the efforts of her family – in the tech field that has been dominated by a narrow section of people. We also discuss if diversity in high positions in the tech space can change things from within or if there are structural conditions that need larger solutions. On poetry, Rukhsana elucidates, “I have grown to see poetry beyond a language; for me poetry has transcended language, so I often feel that I carry poetry with me just walking on the streets, by observing beautiful things, by having lovely conversations, that is also poetic for me. So, for me poetry does not need to be in a language, on a piece of paper, or to be expressed always. But when I feel the need to express, I write. It also gives me the freedom to write when I want to.” 

*Name has been changed to protect the identity of the guest.

In this episode, our conversation with Leil-Zahra Mortada draws from their expertise on digital rights, online security, and open source investigations from anticolonial, feminist and queer perspectives. Their work spans across the fields of art/ filmmaking, activism and research, and includes the archival project “Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution”; the awarded “Breakup in 9 Scenes”, and the decolonial-feminist music research project Sound Frontier focusing on marginalized music and sound art. Apart from their work with different organizations Indymedia, Mozilla Foundation and Tactical Tech, Leil-Zahra has also been part of forming several political collectives and alternative media groups in Lebanon, Egypt, Spain and elsewhere.
By working on the intersections of human rights and digital technologies, Leil-Zahra brings forth several pertinent questions in this episode: who produces digital technologies and whose rights are included? How do marginalized communities engage with them? And what are the alternatives to present day technologies? The interdisciplinary nature of their work further facilitates our discussions on the structural frames for studying digital technologies.

Leil-Zahra Mortada on Twitter: @LeilZahra

In this episode, we are talking to Mona Sloane, a New York University (NYU) based sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. Mona talks with us about her many struggles and her engagement as a feminist tech researcher and activist who strives for more justice in the digital world. One of her many projects is the Terra Incognita NYC project, an investigation of New York City’s digital public spaces in the pandemic, a project that showed the escalated impact of well-known issues that exist within digital space—such as the digital divide, harassment, disproportionately impacted communities. In 2020, Mona was added to the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame”. Mona is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, as well as a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK).

https://newpublic.org/terra-incognita
https://womeninaiethics.org/the-list/hall-of-fame/
https://ipk.nyu.edu/people/mona-sloane/

Mona Sloane on Twitter: @mona_sloane

Follow the podcast on Twitter: @purplecodepod

This conversation with Eliana Quiroz, digital rights activist and author from Bolivia and temporary fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg, delves into the many implications of digital media for women. Eliana has co-founded the Bolivian digital rights collective https://internetbolivia.org/ and has fought for decades to improve digital rights in Bolivia. As she explains, this entails to maneuver a highly polarized political context, and to maintain a stubborn persistency. She has engaged in fostering free software, in drafting and lobbying a data protection bill, and to support self-defense strategies against online violence directed towards women and indigenous communities. She furthermore elaborates on how being a woman in male dominated tech and political communities affects her work – a situation to which Sana, Bianca, and Lena can relate very well, as becomes clear in the conversation.

Eliana Quiroz on Twitter: @e_liana

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This first episode introduces the hosts of the podcast, who are Berlin based researchers from the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. They introduce themselves and explain why they look at digitalized societies through an intersectional feminist perspective. They see the podcast as a way to listen to voices that are often silenced when talking about the digital transformation of societies, and to take seriously the personal views and experiences of their future guests in order to challenge the aura of objectivity of digital technologies that is dominant in public and academic discourse.

Sana Ahmad is a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin and currently works as a research fellow with the research group ‘Work in Highly Automated, Digital-Hybrid Processes’ at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin, associated with the ‘Globalization, Work, and Production’ unit at the Berlin Social Science Center. Her interdisciplinary research project looks at the global content moderation value chains and labor processes in India. Sana is from India and has been living in Berlin for the last few years.
Personal Website | WZB Website | Twitter: @san_amd

Lena Ulbricht is a political scientist and leads a research group at the Weizenbaum-Institute for the Networked Society, and is member of the group Politics of Digitalization of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Her research focuses on the use of digital technologies for governance and the transformation of state power. She also analyzes technology regulation, platform governance, and resistance against digital technologies. She has a Chilean-German background and two daughters.
WZB Website | Weizenbaum Website | Twitter: @lena_ulbricht

Bianca Herlo is a design researcher and lecturer based in Berlin. She works in the field of social design at the Berlin University of the Arts and leads the research group “Inequality and Digital Sovereignty” at the Berlin Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. Bianca teaches design and design theory at various universities and has been chair of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF) since 2021.
Weizenbaum Website | Design Research Lab | Twitter: @bherlo

Follow the podcast on Twitter: @purplecodepod