Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This contribution shows how participatory design mobilizes marginalized perspectives in order to imagine alternative socio-technical futures against digital gender-based violence. The resulting prototype foregrounds justice, care, and non-extractive infrastructures against dominant Big Tech logics.

Paper long abstract

Digital gender-based violence has expanded across online environments and services, becoming embedded in everyday digital practices and sociotechnical infrastructures (Hall et al. 2022). Drawing on STS and feminist technoscience, this contribution starts from the premise that technologies are being shaped by, and shape, power relations (Benjamin 2023), enabling both harm and possibilities for resistance (Schwartz and Neff 2019).

This contribution presents results from the project Gendering Internet. Violence, Resilience, Empowerment in Digital Spaces (GIVRE), funded by Next Generation EU. We focus on two participatory design workshops with activists and anti-violence practitioners. Through a counterfactual scripting methodology (Huybrechts & Hendriks 2016) and hands-on activities, they created a prototype that challenged the logics and ideologies embedded in Big Tech platforms by questioning: what digital technologies might exist today if they had been developed around principles of gender justice, care, and collective well-being rather than proprietary and profit-driven logics?

Conceptualizing digital violence as part of a broader continuum of gendered and structural harms in sociotechnical systems (Eubanks 2018), the workshops sought to surface situated knowledge, practices of resistance, and alternative technological imaginaries emerging from marginalized perspectives. They revealed a demand for technologies that act as spaces of care, relation, and self-determination. These demands were translated into design choices and micro-interactions in the interactive prototype. The resulting artefact illustrates design suggestions for avoiding profiling or identity requirements, conceiving of community as a relational technology, while creating an infrastructure designed to foster mutual recognition rather than data extraction.