Papers by Helena Suárez Val
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IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2025
This paper advances the notion of "data-inflected visions" to show how various visual representat... more This paper advances the notion of "data-inflected visions" to show how various visual representations may come come to be imagined as data, and how doing so opens up different meanings for the political and affective work of data. The visuality of social issues is produced through competing hegemonic and alternative visions, and conventional visualization is not the only format in which data participate in visual contestation. Focusing on Latin American actions to visibilizar feminicide, I propose an encounter with activist-made imagery to elucidate how data participate in alternative representations of the issue. The article contributes both an exploration of the role of data in constructing how feminicide is seen and a novel approach to study data and visuality, to inspire scholars from visual studies and from feminist and critical data and data visualization studies to engage with images beyond conventional graphic representation as sites for the political affective work of data.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2024
Feminicide is the gender-related killing of cisgender and transgender women and girls. It reflect... more Feminicide is the gender-related killing of cisgender and transgender women and girls. It reflects patriarchal and racialized systems of oppression and reveals how territories and socio-economic landscapes configure everyday gender-related violence. In recent decades, many grassroots data production initiatives have emerged with the aim of monitoring this extreme but invisibilized phenomenon. We bridge scholarship in feminist and information geographies with data feminism to examine the ways in which space, broadly defined, shapes the counterdata production strategies of feminicide data activists. Drawing on a qualitative study of 33 monitoring efforts led by civil society organizations across 15 countries, primarily in Latin America, we provide a conceptual framework for examining the spatial dimensions of data activism. We show how there are striking transnational patterns related to where feminicide goes unrecorded, resulting in geographies of missing data. In response to these omissions, activists deploy multiple spatialized strategies to make these geographies visible, to situate and contextualize each case of feminicide, to reclaim databases as spaces for memory and witnessing, and to build transnational networks of solidarity. In this sense, we argue that data activism about feminicide constitutes a space of resistance and resignification of everyday forms of gender-related violence.
Big Data & Society, 2023
Data has become a key format for activists to visibilizar (make visible/call attention to) and de... more Data has become a key format for activists to visibilizar (make visible/call attention to) and denounce social issues. Drawing on the concept of "artivism," we name as data artivism those works that visually intervene in the contestation around an issue by mobilizing art and craft as a form of resistance and as a method to visualize data. In this commentary, we share three examples of data artivism on the issue of feminicide. Our aim is to inspire the fields of critical data and data visualization studies to engage more deeply with art and find common language with artists, activists and advocacy groups (particularly those in Latin America), who are going beyond conventional visualization to reveal a range of alternative ways to mobilize data.
Patterns, 2022
Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem t... more Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem throughout the world. Official government data on gender violence and feminicide are often absent, incomplete, infrequently updated, and contested. We draw on data feminism to situate feminicide data as missing data. Building on qualitative interviews, this study discusses the informatic work of ten activist and civil society organizations across six countries who combat missing data by producing counterdata. Activists enact alternative epistemological approaches to data science that center care, memory, and justice. Activists also face significant information challenges that increase monitoring labor and add emotional burden to reading about violent deaths. This work contributes to literature on data activism and critical data studies, proposing feminicide data practices as an important research subject. The empirical insights contribute to human-computer interaction (HCI) research, suggesting ways that the field may support and sustain the counterdata production practices of activists.
Informatio, May 2021
El feminicidio (o femicidio) es una categoría feminista que designa-y denuncia-a las muertes viol... more El feminicidio (o femicidio) es una categoría feminista que designa-y denuncia-a las muertes violentas de género de mujeres, adolescentes y niñas, en especial sus asesinatos. En América Latina, la categoría ha proporcionado un marco para que las activistas feministas y, más recientemente, los estados recopilen datos sobre el feminicidio. Este trabajo busca comprender las implicancias de las formas en que se estructuran, clasifican y curan los datos de feminicidio, como estos arreglos dirigen las acciones posibles. A través de tres ideas clave-el feminicidio como marco, las trazas digitales de asesinato y los marcos de datos-, el estudio propone un abordaje teórico y metodológico para el análisis de la organización y la presentación de datos sobre asesinatos de mujeres relacionados con el género. Utilizando el método de reconstrucción ontológica, el estudio examina dos datasets de asesinatos de mujeres por razones de género en Uruguay, producidos por una activista y por el estado. Este trabajo muestra cómo las descripciones que proponen los datasets habilitan ciertas acciones (y otras no) y concluye con recomendaciones para revisar el diseño de los datasets de feminicidio y para futuras líneas de investigación.
Mundos Plurales, 2021
En Uruguay acceder a datos oficiales sobre casos de femicidio no es tarea fácil y cuando se acced... more En Uruguay acceder a datos oficiales sobre casos de femicidio no es tarea fácil y cuando se accede, se encuentran datos discordantes. Esta dificultad tiene serias repercusiones, tanto para la concientización de la población como para el diseño de políticas públicas y el accionar de la sociedad civil frente a este fenómeno. Este trabajo examina la importancia y las complejidades de contar con datos (oficiales y no oficiales) sobre las muertes violentas de mujeres por razones de género. A partir de estudios sobre información pública y de documentos oficiales, se realiza una breve reseña de los datos disponibles desde fuentes estatales, señalando algunos vacíos, debilidades y fortalezas. Se concluye con algunas recomendaciones sobre el registro de datos oficiales y futuras líneas de investigación.
Inmaterial, 2018
In recent years, feminist activists in various Latin American countries have been creating digita... more In recent years, feminist activists in various Latin American countries have been creating digital maps of feminicide –the gender-related violent deaths of women. The intersection of activism and mapping has been explored by scholars and activists who have addressed the performative, participatory and political nature of mapping, and by feminist scholars who have analysed and advocated for mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to be reclaimed by and for women, and for feminist thinking and action. In this essay, I use the case of the Feminicidio Uruguay map and draw from some of the ideas of new materialism in order to put forward a novel methodological approach to study such an intersection. An approach that might reveal more complex understandings of the agency of digital things that are created in the disobedient appropriation of everyday objects, such as Google Maps.
Book chapters by Helena Suárez Val
HACIA UN FUTURO SIN FEMICIDIOS Investigación, activismo y respuestas organizadas en las Américas, 2024
Compartimos un breve relato etnográfico de dos encuentros de familiares de víctimas de feminicidi... more Compartimos un breve relato etnográfico de dos encuentros de familiares de víctimas de feminicidio realizados en marzo y noviembre del 2022, en Uruguay. Las reuniones fueron organizadas por distintas actoras feministas, incluyendo las autoras, que trabajan con la temática del feminicidio desde perspectivas complementarias: la academia, la sociedad civil y la producción de datos. Concebimos estos encuentros desde un posicionamiento feminista y solidario como una forma de "acuerpamiento" (Cabnal, 2015). Como resultado entendemos que esta experiencia nos ayuda a comprender otras dimensiones del fenómeno de la violencia feminicida a partir de lo queda después del feminicidio: los duelos y las dificultades por las que atraviesan las familias; las dudas sobre derechos y reconocimiento; también la manera de investigar, enjuiciar y penalizar este tipo de delitos y el acceso al sistema de justicia; y las demandas de asistencia al Estado, dejando evidencia de cómo se perpetúan las reverberaciones del feminicidio.
The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide, 2023
Collectif Féminicides Par Compagnons ou Ex, Feminizidmap, Kathomi Gatwiri, Savia Hasanova, Anna K... more Collectif Féminicides Par Compagnons ou Ex, Feminizidmap, Kathomi Gatwiri, Savia Hasanova, Anna Kapushenko, Lyubava Malysheva, Saide Mobayed Vega, Audrey Mugeni, Rosalind Page, Ivonne Ramírez, Helena Suárez Val, Dawn Wilcox, and Aimee Zambrano Ortiz
This chapter weaves together, as nodes in a network of care, the experiences of activists collecting feminicide data in France, Germany, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Russia, the United States, and Venezuela. In our work, we draw from a long genealogy of feminist research and activism on femicide/feminicide and gender-related violence. To contextualise our practices, we draw on data activism and data feminism as theoretical lenses. Methodologically, we inhabited each other’s experiences through an iterative conversation and co-writing session where we reflected on questions related to the context of our work, our data-making process, the mental and emotional toll, and the challenges and opportunities of generating feminicide data. The experiences of producing feminicide data we share here, together with others around the world, are valuable because they show how women organise to fight against the inequalities that affect us every day.
Femicide Volume XII Living Victims of Femicide, 2019
In this paper, four researcher-activists, mappers of feminicide in Ciudad Juarez, the State of Me... more In this paper, four researcher-activists, mappers of feminicide in Ciudad Juarez, the State of Mexico, Mexico, and Uruguay (Ivonne Ramírez, Sonia Madrigal, María Salguero, Helena Suárez Val), briefly present our personal and embodied experiences of monitoring, recording, and mapping cases of feminicide. The objective is to reflect on the practices of creating these activist tools, how the issue cuts through us, what are the processes, lessons learned, and questions involved in this practice.
Living Victims of Femicide FEMICIDE, Volume XII, 2019
MONITORING, RECORDING, AND MAPPING FEMINICIDE -
EXPERIENCES FROM MEXICO AND URUGUAY by Helena Suá... more MONITORING, RECORDING, AND MAPPING FEMINICIDE -
EXPERIENCES FROM MEXICO AND URUGUAY by Helena Suárez Val, Uruguay, and Sonia Madrigal, Ivonne Ramírez and María Salguero Bañuelos, Mexico
Networked Feminisms. Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices, 2021
The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide, 2023
This chapter weaves together, as nodes in a network of care, the experiences of activists collect... more This chapter weaves together, as nodes in a network of care, the experiences of activists collecting feminicide data in France, Germany, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Russia, the United States, and Venezuela. In our work, we draw from a long genealogy of feminist research and activism on femicide/feminicide and gender-related violence. To contextualise our practices, we draw on data activism and data feminism as theoretical lenses. Methodologically, we inhabited each other’s experiences through an iterative conversation and co-writing session where we reflected on questions related to the context of our work, our data-making process, the mental and emotional toll, and the challenges and opportunities of generating feminicide data. The experiences of producing feminicide data we share here, together with others around the world, are valuable because they show how women organise to fight against the inequalities that affect us every day.
Conference Papers by Helena Suárez Val
MD4SG’20, 2020
Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem i... more Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as they are in the rest of the world. Although governments have passed legislation criminalizing feminicide, these laws have not been accompanied by relevant policy nor by robust data collection that measures the scope and scale of the problem. Drawing from Data Feminism, we situate feminicide data as "missing data" and describe the work of activists and civil society organizations who attempt to fill in the gaps by compiling incidents of feminicide from news reports. Activists doing this work face challenges: lack of time and financial resources, difficulties in accessing official data, and the mental health burden of reading about violent deaths of women. In this article, we describe our work-in-progress on a participatory action research project designed to help sustain activist efforts to collect feminicide data by partially automating detection using machine learning. We created and labeled a data set for identifying feminicide from media reports and trained a model using this data. The accuracy of the model on our test data set was 81.1%, which shows promise for reducing the labor required to identify and log feminicides, among Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).
IV Congreso Latinoamericano y Caribeño de Ciencias Sociales, 2017
Desde 2016 co-conduzco, junto a Elena Fonseca de Cotidiano Mujer, el podcast semanal #Informativo... more Desde 2016 co-conduzco, junto a Elena Fonseca de Cotidiano Mujer, el podcast semanal #InformativoFeminista. Este podcast es una colaboración que habita varias dis/continuidades en el tiempo y el espacio: distintas etapas y formas de vida, diferentes generaciones feministas, brecha digital generacional y distancia geográfica.
A partir de esta experiencia, en esta ponencia exploro: ¿De qué maneras se pueden conceptualizar las (dis/)continuidades (Karen Barad 2010) entre generaciones feministas, desordenando narrativas “crono-normativas” (Elizabeth Freeman 2010) que fijan límites entre las mismas? ¿Cómo contribuyen nuestras prácticas feministas a interrumpir discursos dominantes en la esfera pública, o a constituir una “esfera pública crítica” (Seyla Benhabib 1997) o “contrapúblico subalterno” (Nancy Fraser 1990)?
The radio broadcasting soundscape in Uruguay, online and offline, is overwhelmingly masculine. If... more The radio broadcasting soundscape in Uruguay, online and offline, is overwhelmingly masculine. If we imagined the Uruguayan airwaves only carrying the sound of those voices legitimally allowed in the public sphere, we could argue that women’s and feminist voices have traditionally been muted and marginalised. However, women, and feminist women in particular, have resisted this marginalisation: from founding an all-female radio in the 1930s to, most recently, creating feminist podcasts and collective transnational radio broadcasts, women have been actively speaking up on radio and online broadcasts. Through the example of the #InformativoFeminista de Nunca en Domingo – a podcast I’ve been producing in collaboration with Elena Fonseca from Uruguayan NGO Cotidiano Mujer, in this paper, I work with Nancy Fraser’s concept of subaltern counterpublics and Seyla Benhabib’s notion of the critical public sphere, to begin exploring the ways and the extent to which feminist voices broadcasting on the radio and online interrupt dominant discourses in the Uruguayan public sphere and constitute a critical feminist counterpublic that contributes to strengthening the feminist movement.
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Papers by Helena Suárez Val
Book chapters by Helena Suárez Val
This chapter weaves together, as nodes in a network of care, the experiences of activists collecting feminicide data in France, Germany, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Russia, the United States, and Venezuela. In our work, we draw from a long genealogy of feminist research and activism on femicide/feminicide and gender-related violence. To contextualise our practices, we draw on data activism and data feminism as theoretical lenses. Methodologically, we inhabited each other’s experiences through an iterative conversation and co-writing session where we reflected on questions related to the context of our work, our data-making process, the mental and emotional toll, and the challenges and opportunities of generating feminicide data. The experiences of producing feminicide data we share here, together with others around the world, are valuable because they show how women organise to fight against the inequalities that affect us every day.
EXPERIENCES FROM MEXICO AND URUGUAY by Helena Suárez Val, Uruguay, and Sonia Madrigal, Ivonne Ramírez and María Salguero Bañuelos, Mexico
Conference Papers by Helena Suárez Val
A partir de esta experiencia, en esta ponencia exploro: ¿De qué maneras se pueden conceptualizar las (dis/)continuidades (Karen Barad 2010) entre generaciones feministas, desordenando narrativas “crono-normativas” (Elizabeth Freeman 2010) que fijan límites entre las mismas? ¿Cómo contribuyen nuestras prácticas feministas a interrumpir discursos dominantes en la esfera pública, o a constituir una “esfera pública crítica” (Seyla Benhabib 1997) o “contrapúblico subalterno” (Nancy Fraser 1990)?
This chapter weaves together, as nodes in a network of care, the experiences of activists collecting feminicide data in France, Germany, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Russia, the United States, and Venezuela. In our work, we draw from a long genealogy of feminist research and activism on femicide/feminicide and gender-related violence. To contextualise our practices, we draw on data activism and data feminism as theoretical lenses. Methodologically, we inhabited each other’s experiences through an iterative conversation and co-writing session where we reflected on questions related to the context of our work, our data-making process, the mental and emotional toll, and the challenges and opportunities of generating feminicide data. The experiences of producing feminicide data we share here, together with others around the world, are valuable because they show how women organise to fight against the inequalities that affect us every day.
EXPERIENCES FROM MEXICO AND URUGUAY by Helena Suárez Val, Uruguay, and Sonia Madrigal, Ivonne Ramírez and María Salguero Bañuelos, Mexico
A partir de esta experiencia, en esta ponencia exploro: ¿De qué maneras se pueden conceptualizar las (dis/)continuidades (Karen Barad 2010) entre generaciones feministas, desordenando narrativas “crono-normativas” (Elizabeth Freeman 2010) que fijan límites entre las mismas? ¿Cómo contribuyen nuestras prácticas feministas a interrumpir discursos dominantes en la esfera pública, o a constituir una “esfera pública crítica” (Seyla Benhabib 1997) o “contrapúblico subalterno” (Nancy Fraser 1990)?