Purple Code

In this episode, we speak with Paul about our responsibility to society as analysts, and about the role of artists in translating back and forth between theoretical foundations and practical forms of action. The conversation explores how theory and practice can be meaningfully combined, how we can build the capacity to intervene and create change, and why a deep understanding of historical develop...

In this episode, we speak with Anna about the possibilities and limitations of bridging engaged research, activism, and academia, and about how social media platforms such as Facebook both support and constrain feminist activism. Examples include the Arab Spring as well as more recent developments. A central focus is the role of content moderation in feminist activism. In addition, Anna reflects o...

In this episode, we sit down with Rosa Wevers, dutch researcher, curator, and critical thinker at the intersection of gender studies, digital technology, and the arts. Rosa shares her journey into exploring how systems of oppression are entangled with technological development, especially AI. Together, we ask: How can art challenge dominant narratives about tech? How is technology shaping not just...

Elisa is co-founder of SUPERRR, a lab for feminist futures that Elisa founded together with Julia Kloiber. SUPERRR deals with traditional questions of digital rights and understands feminism as inherent intersectional feminism. Our guest Elisa works to create a base where different expertise can come together and have fruitful conversations about digital, but also social justice issues. In this ep...

Martina researches the use of digital technologies in rural indigenous communities in the Puna of Jujuy, Northwest Argentina. The Jujuy Puna is part of the so-called Lithium Triangle, a high-altitude desert area where lithium - one of the most important minerals for the production of digital technologies - is mined and processed, leading to the pollution of scarce water resources. In addition, the...

After a long summer break, we are back with a new exiting guest: Clara Herrmann. Since 2019, Clara has headed the JUNGE AKADEMIE, the international artist-in-residence program of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. For JUNGE AKADEMIE she developed the program HUMAN MACHINE and initiated and curated the project AI ANARCHIES with a fellowship program and an autumn school co-curated by Nora N. Khan and...

Aida Eyvazzadeh and Sakine M. Bozorg are former content moderators in Berlin who worked for a global social media platform. The are both from Iran and in this episode, they talk about why and how migrant workers in Germany constitute as a crucial labor supply to the global platform economy. They explain what content moderation is, how it is labor intensive work and requires several skills. Instead...

In this episode, we speak with Basma Mostafa, a journalist from Egypt living in exile in Germany. We speak about the role of journalism and the use of digital technologies including social media during and following the Egyptian revolution. We learn about the increasing threats to press freedom and military violence against journalists, lawyers and activists in the country, and hopes of fighting t...

Our guest Armaghan Naghipour is a lawyer specializing in migration and anti-discrimination law and the deputy chairwoman of DeutschPlus (https://www.deutsch-plus.de). Most recently, she was State Secretary for Science, Research and Equality in the State of Berlin. Prior to that, she held various advisory positions in Berlin state politics, including helping to draft Berlin’s state anti-discriminat...

What is participatory research, and how hard is it to navigate disciplines like sociology and computer science at the same time? Dr. Milagros Miceli - a sociologist and a computer scientist - is from Argentina and currently based in Berlin. Her research on data work is widely known to provide rich empirical evidence on the abysmal working conditions of click workers and content moderators in Germa...

Our summer break episode is a special one: Helena Mihaljević, mathematician and professor for computer science, talks about her fascination for math, chess and boxing; about her migration history; about training data that are so deeply rooted in our culture and history. Helena elaborates why math is not neutral, how she experiences improvements in the tech industry, and her involvement in an ongoi...

Meera Ghani is a digital rights and climate activist from Pakistan, based in Belgium. In this episode we talk about many forms of violence against feminist, environmental and digital rights activists in Pakistan and in the West, which are often amplified by digital technologies. Meera shares with us her a vision of a culture of care as an antidote to online and offline violence. Meera explains why...

We talk about Renata’s experiences as a human rights lawyer and her work with regards to massive human rights violations of indigenous people in Latin America. She elaborates on the potentials of technology when in the hands of people and how she dealt with testimony material and archives, with hours and hours of testimonies. The impermanence of the human rights internet and the lack of support of...

Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer is a Brooklyn native and a long-term Berlin resident with a background in digital transformation and social entrepreneurship. In this episode, Nakeema shares many insights into decades of experience in the tech sector. Her work spans from years of research in North Africa and the Middle East to operating in the tech sector in New York, Toronto and Boston. In Berlin, she fou...

Rukhsana* is a queer software developer and poet who recently moved to Berlin. In this episode, Rukhsana talks about her journey in designing software, coming from South Asia and the particularities of power during the migration process. She talks about how she has managed to take space - both by chance and by the efforts of her family - in the tech field that has been dominated by a narrow sectio...

In this episode, our conversation with Leil-Zahra Mortada draws from their expertise on digital rights, online security, and open source investigations from anticolonial, feminist and queer perspectives. Their work spans across the fields of art/ filmmaking, activism and research, and includes the archival project “Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution”; the awarded “Breakup in 9 Scenes”, an...

In this episode, we are talking to Mona Sloane, a New York University (NYU) based sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. Mona talks with us about her many struggles and her engagement as a feminist tech researcher and activist who strives for more justice in the digital world. One of her many projects is the Terra Incognita NYC project, a...

This conversation with Eliana Quiroz, digital rights activist and author from Bolivia and temporary fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg, delves into the many implications of digital media for women. Eliana has co-founded the Bolivian digital rights collective and has fought for decades to improve digital rights in Bolivia. As she explains, this entails to maneuver a highly polarized pol...

This first episode introduces the hosts of the podcast, who are Berlin based researchers from the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. They introduce themselves and explain why they look at digitalized societies through an intersectional feminist perspective. They see the podcast as a way to listen to voices that are often silenced when talking about the digital transformation of societ...