Global

The digital rights movement needs to become deliberately and intentionally inclusive. We need to actively engage with how technologies and the internet are racist, as well as how they perpetuate other oppressions through silence.  

In this article, the Zimbabwean feminist researcher and writer Fungai Machirori challenges the idea of "the global South" as a homogenous space.

How does working online change and challenge gender dynamics at the workplace? Here we learn more through the experience of a barrister about how some of the changes brought about by COVID-19 could potentially be liberating and eventually change the workplace to make it better for women.

In this beautifully etched illustration we follow the stories of various women who are working in community networks and their journeys with technology, autonomy and self-realisation. 

For some of us pleasure in our work is possible, even if it is to find the breaking and bending points in the institutions of policy and law. But even though political and particularly feminist frameworks make space for pleasure, where is the space for that in legal or policy language at the international or national level?

In this fourth column on gender and community networks, Nic Bidwell looks closely at the processes and difficulties of research on the social and gender impact of Community Networks in rural places, and focuses on some issues encountered in the nitty-gritty of such research.

The internet is viewed as the gateway to development. So, how do we respond to the challenge of the persistent digital divide? Mariana Fossatti says that we have to do this from a standpoint of decolonising our thinking, and only that will open the possibilities of reconsideration of the global governance of the internet, prioritising factors of justice and equity.

In this third column on gender and community networks, GenderIT interviews Carlos Rey Moreno on what movement building around community networks is all about. How do we get policy makers, organisers, community based organisations and others invested and interested in community networks? And in this constellation of actors and organisations, how do we start talking about gender equality and…

n this column on community networks and gender, the writers will explore how communities can provide and run their own internet infrastructure, the existing forms of community networks, the legal and policy environment in which they have to exist and what are the gender dynamics around these networks. Here we interview Steve Song about the policy and regulatory environment for community…

Sanitary Panels is an ironic yet hard hitting series where social commentary masquerades as humour and makes us rethink many of our assumptions. In this comic Sanitary Panels looks at the difference that women and men achievers face and what assumptions are imposed by social and cultural ideas around gender.