The Elephant Talk is a participatory project that in recent months has led a network of European entities to question and experiment with practices and methodologies on the humanistic approach to data collection and representation, and their use as both social transformative and awareness raising tools.
After training on how to create the tools from a transfeminist and intersectional perspective, as well as their use as tools for awareness, advocacy, and education, the project partners worked together to create a survey and structure focus groups to engage young people living in Italy, Croatia, Romania, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, and Spain in an investigation of the systemic phenomenon of online gender hatred and body shaming.
The understanding of these systemic phenomena is critical to developing concrete and impacting strategies that contrast them. And it is in this direction that data play a central role, because they can provide us with a snapshot of the problem and be a substantial tool in the field of research, promotion of effective public policies and development of engaging awareness campaigns.
However, in order for the data collected to be truly representative and for bias to be minimized, the process of data collection needs to pass through a participatory, open, and accessible method: directly involving people who have in different ways experienced these forms of digital violence up close. As the authors of Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, write, a collection that starts from an intersectional perspective must take into account not only gender, but include all kinds of marginalized subjectivities or those who have experienced and are experiencing forms of oppression. Indeed, data are never neutral; they tell of the experiences and knowledge of whom collected, analyzed, and communicated them.
The participatory approach, therefore, is precisely one of the elements behind the data collection we have chosen to conduct, so that the traditional barriers of research and collection, which are sometimes distant from the real experiences of all people, can be more cushioned. Through a process of co-creation, which has involved activist, experts in the field of data collection and visualization, but especially teenagers and young people who are collaborating in the research, the goal is to build a more collective shared knowledge of the phenomenon, capable of reflecting its complexities.
For this reason, in developing the Elephant Talk survey and constructing the methodology behind it, we wanted to go beyond the simple collection of numbers, to try to return a qualitative cross-section of individual experiences and tools of self-defense or protection from the systemic phenomenon of body shaming and more generally of gender hatred on the web.
Through open-ended questions wanting to represent the variety of situations experienced, the participatory collection will take into account different perspectives and sensitivities. The goal is also to recognize and name the emotional impact and the dynamics through which online hate phenomena aimed at women and marginalized categories are manifested, and the individual and collective responses to this violence. The path of research and analysis will be followed by as much transparent and accessible dissemination which will try to offer researchers, policy makers, civil society organizations, educational institutions and teachers, concrete tools to act and understand the phenomenon. The analysis of the data, which will be shared free of charge with the community, may also give rise to awareness campaigns, intervention protocols, and supportive strategies to counter the forms of gender hatred and discrimination that are spreading in our digital spaces.
Download the methodology: Methodology.pdf
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.