Feminist Futures Now: Feminist Re-imaginations of Digital Rights
Feminist Futures Now was a 2.5 day workshop held in Goa in August 2024. Designed as an 'unconference' to foster participation, inclusion, and reconciliation, the workshop brought together activists and organisations working with women and girls, queer and trans communities, sex workers, persons with disabilities, and in tech, digital rights and policy spaces. Together, we thought about pathways towards gender-equitable digital futures.
A recent study by Digital Futures Lab, Empowering Women and Girls in Digital India: Knowledge, Policy, and Programmatic Gaps, showed that while technology policy in India is focused on advanced technologies, basic issues such as access and safety for women and girls continue to persist, along with newer digital gender-based violence and harms.
Advancing the digital rights of women, girls, and gender and sexual minorities, and gender-equitable societies, require a collaborative and coordinated effort. However, grassroots and civil society organisations are rarely consulted in mainstream technology policy conservations. Vocabularies and theories of change also differ across interventions proposed by policy, research, and grassroots organisations.
💡 How might we strengthen linkages between grassroots and policy organisations, so that the lived experiences and lessons of girls and women are better reflected in dominant policy imaginaries and interventions?
Feminist Futures Now focused on:
- Building stronger networks between grassroots and policy organisations
- Sharing knowledge, best practices, and learnings
- Identifying collaborative strategies to advance digital rights and safety for women, girls, queer, and trans communities in India. </aside>