About

Catherine D'Ignazio is an affiliated faculty member in CMS/W and an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab. D'Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer, and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy, and civic engagement. She co-authored the book Data Feminism (MIT Press 2020), which charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her latest book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press 2024), highlights how mainstream data science can learn from the care and memory work of grassroots feminist activists across the Americas. D'Ignazio regularly teaches the data journalism module for the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing and has previously taught the CMS/W graduate technology workshop.

Selected publications

• Funding AI for Good: A Call for Meaningful Engagement

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Artificial Intelligence for Social Good (AI4SG) is a growing area that explores AI’s potential to address social issues, such as public health. Yet prior work has shown limited evidence of its tangible benefits for intended communities, and projects frequently face real-world deployment and sustainability challenges. While existing HCI literature on AI4SG initiatives primarily focuses on the mechanisms of funded projects and their outcomes, much less attention has been given to the upstream funding agendas that influence project approaches. In this work, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of 35 funding documents, representing about $410 million USD in total investments. We uncovered a spectrum of conceptual framings of AI4SG and the approaches that funding rhetoric promoted: from biasing towards technology capacities (more techno-centric) to emphasizing contextual understanding of the social problems at hand alongside technology capacities (more balanced). Drawing on our findings on how funding documents construct AI4SG, we offer recommendations for funders to embed more balanced approaches in future funding call designs. We further discuss implications for how the HCI community can positively shape AI4SG funding design processes.

  PublisherDOI

• Reimagining Data Work: Participatory Annotation Workshops as Feminist Practice

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  AI systems depend on the invisible and undervalued labor of data workers, who are often treated as interchangeable units of labor rather than as collaborators with meaningful expertise. Critical scholars and practitioners have proposed alternative principles for data work, but few empirical studies examine how to enact them in practice. This paper bridges this gap through a case study of multilingual, iterative, and participatory data annotation processes with journalists and activists focused on news narratives of gender-related violence. We offer two methodological contributions. First, we demonstrate how workshops rooted in feminist epistemology can foster dialogue, build community, and disrupt knowledge hierarchies in data annotation. Second, drawing insights from practice, we deepen analysis of existing feminist and participatory principles. We show, for example, that prioritizing context and pluralism in practice may require “bounding” context and working towards what we describe as a “tactical consensus.” We also explore tensions around materially acknowledging labor while resisting transactional researcher-participant dynamics. Through this work, we contribute to growing efforts to reimagine data and AI development as relational and political spaces for understanding difference, enacting care, and building solidarity across shared struggles.

  PublisherDOI

• Unicorns, Janitors, Ninjas, Wizards, and Rock Stars

  2025-10-22

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter, reprinted from Data Feminism, emphasizes the importance of pluralism in data science, arguing that comprehensive knowledge emerges from synthesizing diverse perspectives, particularly local, Indigenous, and experiential insights. It critiques the glamorization of data scientists as “rock stars” or “wizards” who alone can manage data, pointing out that such metaphors are not only misleading but also perpetuate gender and racial stereotypes. A key example discussed is the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) in San Francisco, which employs a collaborative and inclusive approach to data visualization to highlight the city’s eviction crisis. This chapter also highlights the pitfalls of over-prioritizing data cleanliness and control, suggesting that this can obscure the richness and context of the original data, a concept linked to historical eugenics movements. Ultimately, this chapter calls for a shift from the “data for good” model, which can often be paternalistic, to a “data for co-liberation” model, emphasizing community-led initiatives, knowledge transfer, and building social infrastructure, ensuring that data projects empower marginalized groups and foster solidarity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Data Against Feminicide: The Process and Impact of Co-designing Digital Research Tools

  2025-01-24

  book-chapterOpen access

  Data Against Feminicide is an action-research collaboration that aims to foster an international community of practice around feminicide data. In this chapter, we present two tools we have co-designed and piloted with activists to facilitate their work and alleviate the burdens of workflow. Data Against Feminicide Email Alerts is an AI-based system that detects cases of feminicide from media sources; Data Against Feminicide Highlighter is a browser plug-in that helps activists scan media articles for specific data. By outlining the process and impacts of this work, we aim to motivate others to fully utilize feminist participatory approaches that place technology development and data science in the service of activists, movements, and changemakers who are making a difference in the world.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Data activism and social media in the case of racialized and gendered deaths and disappearances

  Feminist Media Studies · 2025-01-15 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Housing data politics in the United States: Inequitable open data, informal networks, and strategic neutrality

  Journal of Urban Affairs · 2025-09-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Open housing data—property transactions, eviction filings, 311 complaints, and rental registries—have been a crucial resource for policymaking and real estate professionals. Meanwhile, housing data actors increasingly collect, analyze, and use data to address housing inequality, including efforts related to eviction prevention and land use reform, among others. This paper examines the motivations and practices of grassroots and institutional housing data actors. From a field scan of 67 entities engaged in housing data work across 12 U.S. states and 18 municipalities, we conducted 18 in-depth interviews to explore how housing data actors operate, their political goals, and data processes. We put forward a two‑axis framework that positions housing data actors according to their organizational structure (institutional/grassroots) and their stated data ideology (neutral/political). This framework contributes to understanding how different actors navigate complex issues such as embedded power dynamics and ethics in housing data. This two-axis view supplies a vocabulary for tracing how normative commitments and material constraints shape housing data pipelines and, ultimately, housing outcomes across the broader housing information ecosystem.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Archaeology of Self: Reflexivity in Data Activism to Address Systemic Injustices

  2025-10-29

  articleOpen access

  EAAMO ’25, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  PublisherDOI

• Co-creating a justice-centered product design specifications tool

  Proceedings of the Design Society · 2025-08-01

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT: As society and the field of engineering evolves, it is necessary for engineering tools to evolve as well. Through a co-design approach, this work explores the re-design of Pugh’s Product Design Specifications tool for engineering design courses to increase scaffolding of the tool for student learning and incorporate societal implications drawing upon design justice. This re-design was conducted in collaboration with Elizabethtown College faculty members, instructors and students. This paper details the iterative co-design process, showcasing the evolution of the tool that culminated in the latest iteration of the re-designed PDS tool. We conclude with a reflection on this co-design process and recommendations for evolving other engineering design tools to incorporate social justice concepts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Trans Data: A Research and Design Agenda from Trans Activists' Transformative Data Science

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-10-16

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Trans activists play a deeply important role in caring for and advocating for the transgender community using data. Through an interview study with 16 trans activists working in trans-led and trans-serving organizations in the United States, we document how they use restorative/transformative data science processes of resolving, researching, recording, and refusing and using data. We incorporate their data practices with trans technology and trans competent interaction design approaches to propose a research agenda for trans data : materially improve trans lives, cross data boundaries, and constantly engage in power analysis. We expound on how a trans data research agenda can benefit data advocacy and CSCW research and design.

  PublisherDOI

• People’s Practices in the Face of Data Power

  Bristol University Press eBooks · 2024-08-29

  book-chapterOpen access

  The shift towards big data-driven decision-making and algorithmic automation across many aspects of everyday life remains a contentious subject of debate and critique. Critical social scientists and media scholars assert that this shift alters the nexus and power relations between state, citizens, and industry. Individuals and communities have little control over how their data are collected and have little to no influence on the algorithmically informed decisions that govern their lives. This chapter addresses power asymmetries that are emerging at this contemporary juncture. The chapter points to possibilities to agency in the data practices, including consent practices, refusal practices, citizen participation (including citizen juries and citizen assemblies), as well as other forms of data activism. In doing so, we aim to contribute to reshaping data power from the bottom up and propose people-centred and radically contextualized approaches to imagining alternative data futures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Labs

• Data + Feminism LabPI

Awards & honors

• Data Feminism (MIT Press 2020)
• Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press 2024…