Session Four | Sep 15
SESSION TITLE
Feminism and policy, what is feminist policy-making?
Feminism in policy and the feminist principles of the internet and CNs: how can we challenge assumptions and what are the challenges when materializing policy with an inclusive perspective
About the Mentors
Paula Martins
Paula is a researcher and activist and is passionate about freedom of expression and information topics. She follows human rights policy issues at the global level, in spaces such as the UN Human Rights Council, UN General Assembly, International Telecommunication Union and Internet Governance Forum, as well as trends at the national level. Before joining APC, Paula worked for more than 10 years monitoring and reporting on violence against journalists and human rights defenders in Brazil and other countries in Latin America. She advocated for important pieces of legislation (such as the Brazilian Access to Information Law and the Internet Rights Framework) and litigated on cases concerning digital rights, the right to protest, and media regulation. She was a regional director at ARTICLE 19 for more than a decade, after serving as a researcher for Human Rights Watch and a human rights officer at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Paula has a LLM from New York University, a MPP from the University of Oxford, and is now pursuing her doctorate studies at McGill University.
Débora Prado
Débora is a journalist and activist with a background in social communications, feminism and human rights, who has been working with communication projects and strategies alongside civil society organisations since 2013. Her main areas of expertise are women’s rights and promotion of freedom of expression in Brazil and South America. Débora holds a Bachelor's degree in social communication and a Master's degree in scientific and cultural dissemination, in which she studied community networks and feminist infrastructures and technologies. She also joined a two-year action-research project in these same fields with the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) in 2019.
ABOUT THE SESSION
In this session you can expect to leave the room with the below takeaways:
- feminist initiatives in policy
- possibilities of feminist approaches in participants’ contexts
Session Topics:
- What do we mean when we refer to feminist policy-making?
- What are the problems of pushing for feminist policy-making in practice? the case of Cybersecurity.
- Imagining an aimed future together.
Structure
Introduction
What do we mean when we refer to feminist policy-making?
Discussion I
Reflections from examples on the ground
– the case of community networks and feminist research
– the case of cybersecurity:
Group exercise
Imagining a feminist policy making: what is the probable scenario in 10 years?
Plenary debrief
Discussion II
What would be the desirable/dreamed scenario and what could be done to lead us in the aimed direction.
Resources
https://feministinternet.org
https://firn.genderit.org/research/encounters-coffees-and-conflicts-reflections-action-research-feminist-autonomous-network
https://www.giswatch.org/en/internet-rights/feminist-autonomous-infrastructures
https://www.apc.org/en/tags/policy-explainers