The online dossier of the Gunda Werner Institute (GWI) looks from intersectional perspectives at state surveillance, (digital) privacy and reproduction in times of Big Data and social media.
As part of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the GWI has been engaged since 2007 in a multi-layered and transdisciplinary way with, as it says in the subtitle, “feminism and gender democracy”. Named after the philosopher, organizational developer, feminist and former executive director of the FrauenAnstiftung, Gunda Werner, the GWI works between the fields of consulting, research, investigation and publication.
The dossier presented here thinks together intersectional perspectives, fundamental rights, and technological discourses. For example, Nicole Shepard ‘s article Surveillance Intersketional: Historical Continuities explores the surveillance of women* and their bodies, as well as the entanglements of race, gender, and surveillance.
In Math can be sexist, too, Leena Simon basically clarifies terms like data retention or metadata – and pleads for a consistent clean-up of the “digital repressions” in German everyday life.
Other contributions to the dossier deal with digital reproductive technologies in the form of menstruation and fertility apps, the increasing danger of intersectional discrimination for ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTQI people, immigrants, refugees, and women* due to the growing presence of video cameras in everyday life, or the “social sorting out” in the datasets of social media.