Feminist Internet Research Network

This collaborative document lays out the various questions around ethics and feminist methodology. You can use the questions as a guide and reminder for how to integrate ethical dimensions into your research.

The women of Democratic Republic of Congo have been part of shaping the civic spaces for years, leading to the freedom of the country to now highlighting major rights-based issues. But in doing so, their voices have not only been silenced by age old patriarchal systems, but they have also been subjected to online violence that stifles their constitutionally protected right to freedom of…

This paper looks at current struggles and transformations on the meanings of online violence in Brazil. It interrogates how feminist research and interventions in digital technologies with regards to online violence against LGTQIA+ in the contemporary political scenario. Responses to online hate speech as political violence shed new light on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and…

Conversations about service delivery apps are usually centred around how customers experience these apps, but rarely do these discussions explore and examine the conditions service providers work in. The study by The Centre for Internet & Society analyses one platform, Urban Company, in India for its treatment of domestic workers who register on the app to provide services on the company's…

Community networks in quilombolas from Terra Seca/Ribeirão Grande in Brazil have been helping households to connect to the internet while serving individual needs of residents. In the backdrop of the FIRN research exploring the same, the authors discuss how these community-led networks connect communities with technology.

As part of the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) project, supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), this white paper aims to assess feminist internet research in relation to internet governance and policy, with a particular focus on scholarship in the global South.

The Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) Women’s Rights Programme’s knowledge building strategic team conducted a meta-research project that focused on the methodological processes and ethical practices of the eight research projects implemented as part of the FIRN project. Meta-research is the study of research, including its…

When conducting feminist research, it is important to acknowledge various intersectionalities, as well as ethics of care, challenges and all the dynamic interconnections in the process. The FIRN partners explore these themes in their research through the years.

The research shows that the introduction of technology brings with itself the same problems that haunt other sectors of platform-mediated gig work. On-demand platforms seek to exert control over most points of the service delivery process, including job distributions, client selection, worker pay and performance evaluation, all the while relegating workers to an independent contractor status…

In Vale do Ribeira, São Paulo, Brazil, a group of ecological, quilombola farmer women, in partnership with two feminist organisations: APC and Sempreviva Organização Feminista (SOF), managed to deploy and operate their Wi-Fi mesh network. Bruna Zanolli highlights the importance of building trust, empathy and feminist guidelines in the community so that their internet infrastructure could…