Our research group warmly invites you to the lecture : Creating an (afro) feminist internet by Neema Iyer, founder and Executive Director of POLLICY, Kampala.

For the past decade, internet connectivity has been praised for its potential to close the gender gap in Africa. Among the many benefits of digitalization, digital tools enable groups that are marginalized across the intersections of gender, race, sex, class, religion, ability and nationality to produce and access new forms of knowledge and conceive counter-discourses. However, the internet, once viewed as a utopia for equality, is proving to be the embodiment of old systems of oppression and violence. Discriminatory gendered practices are shaped by social, economic, cultural and political structures in the physical world and are similarly reproduced online across digital platforms. In this lecture, Neema will talk about findings from research on the online lived experiences of women living in five African countries, about how gendered disinformation impacts women’s participation and why we need to collaboratively create inclusive and ethical digital futures.

Venue: via Zoom
Meeting-ID: 990 8997 8096  Identification code: itegkassel.

Neema Iyer is an artist, a designer and a technologist. She is an active do-er and speaker on data, digital rights and building products to improve service delivery. Neema is the founder and director of a civic technology company, based in Kampala, Uganda: Pollicy. Pollicy uses data, design and technology to improve how citizens and government engage around public service delivery. Neema has a Masters in Public Health from Emory University in Atlanta and has worked on large-scale mobile and digital projects across Africa.This lecture is part of a series of five lectures each of which presents interdisciplinary examples of design research on the digital society. For several years now, ITeG has been organizing an interdisciplinary lecture series in the winter term. The title of ITeG Lectures is "Digital Society - a Design Challenge". Lecturers come from various fields like computer science or social and human sciences or integrative approaches.