In our first episode of Feminist Digital Futures, we sit down with Chenai Chair to reimagine social media and the pathways to making it feminist. Chenai reflects on how the intersectionality of our identities structure our online experiences, how cultures of policing women’s bodies have assumed new forms on the internet, the importance of alternative ownership and design models for social media, and the need to center Global South perspectives when it comes to reimagining social media design and governance.

Episode Navigation
00:10: Introduction
00:47: About Chenai
02:04: How gender and other identities affect experiences of the online sphere
04:56: Why equal access to and participation in social media is a feminist issue
08:55: Chenai’s vision of a feminist social media
14:18: How platform design and governance needs to change, from a feminist and Global South perspective
18:31: Opinions on platform attempts to regulate content
21:41: Conclusion

Chenai Chair is a digital policy and gender researcher with extensive experience in work that is focused on understanding the impact of technology in society in order to better public interest in policy. Keeping in line with her objectives as a feminist researcher, her work centers on gender and data justice perspectives. She has led projects focused on privacy, data protection and AI as Mozilla 2019/2020 fellow, available at mydatarights.africa, and led the research on Women’s Rights Online as the Web Foundation’s gender and digital rights research manager.

Hosted by: Tanvi Kanchan
Research and conceptualization: Nandini Chami & Tanvi Kanchan
Post-production: Tanvi Kanchan
Podcast artwork by: Harmeet Rahal

Acknowledgements
This podcast series has been produced as part of the Feminist Digital Justice project, a joint policy research and advocacy initiative of IT for Change and DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era). The series is co-supported by the World Wide Web Foundation.