Amir H. Payberah - 2025-06-08

Why are so many victims of gender-based violence never counted? Who decides whose lives are worth recording and whose deaths can disappear without a trace? When state institutions fail to respond to such violence, what can be done? And can data science help us in this fight? These are some of the questions Catherine D'Ignazio explores in her book Counting Feminicide. Drawing on the work of feminist groups, especially in Latin America, she shows how, when governments remain silent or fail to act, activists step in to document what the state refuses to acknowledge.

These groups build their own data systems to remember the lives lost, demand justice, and challenge structures of power such as patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. Unlike mainstream data science, which often claims neutrality, this work treats data as a tool for memory, protest, collective organizing, care, and resistance. At the heart of the book is the idea of "counterdata science", a political, collective, and ethical approach to working with data, structured around four key stages of practice: (1) "resolving", the decision to act despite institutional silence; (2) "researching", often in environments marked by missing, fragmented, or biased information; (3) "recording", where data is structured with care and ethical reflection; and (4) "refusing or using data", when strategic choices are made about how and why the data should circulate.

In the end, the book offers a practical toolkit for anyone who wants to use data not as a detached metric but as a force for justice, memory, and liberation. It invites readers to see data as something deeply human, shaped by emotion, power, and politics, and capable of helping us build a more just world.