Workshopping Troubles: Towards Feminist Digital Methods

Digital methods, taken up in the collection and analysis of data, raise concerns around extraction, representation, care, consent, and participation familiar to feminist methodologies. At a feminist STS lab, specialising in digital methods, we convened some workshops to support research design in ongoing projects situated in the Lab’s community, with the aim to articulate feminist principles for digital methods. These projects, working with methods including digital ethnography, database implementation, and machine learning design raise feminist questions around centring care in data collection and participation, navigating hesitancies around extracting data from vulnerable subjects, and working through representational politics of data. These workshops, rather than congealing a set of feminist principles, generated a proliferation of disconcertments and troubles. We offer workshopping troubles as a way to navigate and theorise tensions in designing digital methods research. We account for how these workshops served as a method to elicit troubles, surfacing them for further analysis, and helped us shift from binding dichotomies to troubles that open ongoing inquiry. We reflect on how digital methods return us to troubles that, while well understood in feminist approaches to data, require articulation in practice and research design.