CPWO Research Seminar June
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 Dr. Yimin Chen to lead this Research Seminar. Further details about the talk, the speaker’s biography, and a link to book a place are provided below.
Information is a gun: Recognising information-facilitated interpersonal harms
With the growing popularity of smart technologies, sensitive and personal data has never been more abundant or accessible. While there are legitimate uses and benefits to all this access, such information can also be readily abused to perpetrate interpersonal harms such as invasions of privacy and technology-facilitated sexual violence. Despite these very real threats, there has been relatively little attention paid to the role of information in facilitating these harms. In this talk, I argue that uncritical adherence to ideas like “information wants to be free” among researchers and technologists is comparable to interpreting the American Second Amendment as codifying a nigh-unlimited natural right to gun ownership. That is, a belief in the free access to information as an unalloyed good has created blind spots in academic and popular discourse about the ways in which information can be weaponised to facilitate interpersonal harm.
About the Speaker
Dr. Yimin Chen is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Interaction, Technology & Information in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University, Australia. His research focuses on the prevention of online gender-based violence through technological and social interventions. His other interests include information behaviour, human-computer interaction, mis/disinformation, online trolling, and internet culture and communication.
