Research Seminar – October
Understanding and Addressing Online Harms Against Women and Girls through Research
Online spaces play a huge role in our everyday lives, offering connection, creativity, and community. Yet for many women and girls, these spaces can also bring real risks and harm. These Research Seminars open up a shared conversation about how research can help us understand these experiences and find practical ways to make digital spaces safer and more inclusive. Bringing together researchers, students, practitioners, and members of the wider community, the event is an opportunity to learn from one another, share insights, and explore how we can work collectively to create lasting change.
We are delighted to welcome Habiba Farzand to lead this Research Seminar. Further details about the talk, the speaker’s biography, and a link to book a place are provided below.
Towards Safer Streets: Linking Online Harms and Street Crime
Online spaces play the role of a double-edged sword by providing opportunities for connection and interaction on one side and inciting and increasing online harms such as harassment, bullying, and gender-based violence on the other. These issues are further exacerbated when they translate into real-world consequences and vice versa, impacting users’ safety. Through the lens of sociotechnical research, this seminar will present the exploration of the intersection of online and offline behaviors and harms, particularly around anti-social behavior, violence against women and girls, and knife crimes. The seminar also touches on considerations for a sociotechnical approach to understanding and addressing such issues through the lens of responsible innovation. The seminar will conclude with open research questions for the HCI community to guide future research on sociotechnical methods for safe online spaces. This seminar is designed for an interdisciplinary audience interested in online safety.
About the Speaker
Habiba Farzand is a Research Associate at REPHRAIN – UK’s National Research Center on Privacy, Harm Reduction, and Adversarial Influence Online. Her work focuses on understanding how people interact with technology and designing innovative, user-centric solutions to address privacy and security challenges. She combines interdisciplinary research with creative methodologies to help build safer, more trustworthy digital experiences.
