Newsletter Issue (Oct-Dec 2022)

Greetings from Body & Data!

Welcome to our final and last newsletter issue for October - December 2022. The winter season is getting colder daily, but we hope the bright rays of the sun are making this weather a bit bearable. For this newsletter, we wrap up our final activities for the year 2022 and share exciting news, updates and events happening around digital rights in 2023. We also wish you a year full of collective and healing community for yourself, your close ones, families (blood/chosen) and everyone around you.

RECONNECTING WITH COMMUNITIES - ORGANISATIONAL SURVEY
Reconnecting with communities poster that says to fill out the orgnizational form

Fill out our ORGANISATIONAL SURVEY & 10 lucky winners will get the opportunity to win our latest goodies !!

Thank you for being with us throughout our 2022 journey. We extend our gratitude for always supporting us in making the digital rights movement accessible, free and feminist in our ways. Your engagement with Body & Data has been very valuable to us.

We’ve created this brief survey, which will only take about 2-3 minutes to complete. We want to hear from YOU ! <3
stack of newspapers
Quarterly Media Monitoring Report on Digital Rights in Nepal (Oct-Dec)
 

Among the key issues that stood out in this quarter of the media monitoring report are various tactics and strategies utilised by the political parties and candidates to secure votes during November's election. Among them, text SMS and automated voice recordings through phone calls to voters' were common, despite Advertisement (Regulation) Act stating that it is illegal to do so without taking prior consent of the concerned individuals. We also saw a trampling of freedom of expression and speech, signalling that such a right and its jurisdictions are "in reality" favoured and abused by individuals in power and authority, and not the general public. The re-using of old and lost sim cards and connecting to their digital wallets were seen on the rise, creating concerns about privacy and data privacy. As we also observed the 16 days of Activism Campaign against gendered-based violence, reports and data revealed the impact of online violence on journalists and politicians who identified themselves as women and/or from marginalised communities.
 
Read the full analysis of the reports here.

Content from Our Content Creators
illustration of eyes of different shapes. in the background there are watercolors paints of shades of blue, pink and purple

Our objective in producing commissioned content is to hear perspectives, stories and lived realities of the community we work with, especially women, queer individuals and those who are at the margins within the socio-political-cultural structure of Nepal.

From October to December, we had a piece by Jalasha Sapkota drawing on her experiences as a visually impaired person of the challenges in navigating through the digital space. In "Let’s Strive to Make Our Digital Platforms Accessible for All", Sapkota highlights the need for coordinated multisectoral reforms to consciously "understand, review, renew, and strive for an inclusive digital future" to create a virtual world that is inclusive and accessible for all. Pras, on the other hand, raises important questions regarding the power dynamics inherent in schools in their piece "The Allocishet Vision in Schools: A Digital Perspective". They point out how school infrastructures are working against students who do not conform to allocishet identities and how digital surveillance in school targets them further.
 
Read the blogs from our content creators here.
Content from Our Team

In the context of the national elections, Shubha wrote two pieces highlighting the liabilities of the Election Commission of Nepal with regard to the voters' database. The first piece titled "Datafication, SRHR and Nepal’s Elections" was published in RESURJ, which Shubha is a member of, and focuses on how the issue of Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights has been used by political campaigns and how public access to identifiable demographic information may lead to unconsented and targeted intervention to our bodily autonomy. The second piece titled "किन सार्वजनिक गरियो मतदाताको विवरण ?" (Why was the Voter's List made public?) points out how the Election Commission has not only directly violated the right to privacy of the individuals but also potentially risked the democratic process through big data and micro-targeting.

Constituency Building and Campaigns
Photo of participants of the engagement with activists and media personnels from Gandaki province
Engaging with activists and media personnel from Gandaki province
 

To produce and generate knowledge on digital rights and their aspects at a local level, Body & Data started working with community radios from Gandaki Province starting mid-2022.

Two preliminary workshops were organised as a part of our advocacy and campaign efforts where we assessed the digital rights scenarios of Gandaki Province with the representatives from the community radios, who mostly worked on raising awareness on social issues in their areas. The workshops were a two-way learning process which aimed at gaining a contextual understanding of their digital rights needs in Gandaki while also getting exposed to alternative forms of media and communications outside of the online or social media platforms. Following these workshops, Body & Data with Marsyangdi radio worked on finalising the scripts for the radio episode content which focuses on various digital rights issues such as freedom from violence, understanding digital and internet access, privacy and data privacy: election, among others.
 
Watch out for our radio episodes once it airs starting this January 2023.
Group photo of participants of the event, smiling at the camera, pointing their fingers up in a peace sign
Feminist Tech Exchange (FTX): Digital Security Workshop - Gandaki
 

Feminist Tech Exchange (FTX) is a digital security workshop, that utilises a unique methodology for building capacities through understanding and sharing emerging digital-related issues while questioning the societal and political aspects of technology through a feminist lens.

During this quarter through FTX-Gandaki, we co-created the space with 20 young individuals from Gandaki Province, Nepal who identified as women and queer activists, Dalit rights activists, journalists and tech-enthusiasts. We dived deeper into the broader conversations of digital rights and security and its interlinkage with gender, sexuality, feminism and technology keeping intersectional and feminist perspectives at the core of our conversations. Through this FTX gathering, we also shared some digital security tools and strategies, while facilitating conversations about the feminist internet, online violence, access and data privacy, digital inclusivity and so on.
 
Read the full research here.
Cross Movement Building with Other Movements

Voices of Women Media - TechnoHub

With Voices of Women’s Media’s project called TechnoHub, we got the opportunity to work with almost 50 young women from grade 7 to 10 from various government schools of Kathmandu. Through the two day interactions with the group, we discussed about different facets of digital rights - online gender based violence, ways to counter such violence and reporting mechanisms. Through the collaborative space with the girls, we got to explore what internet means for us and how we can be safe on the internet.


Gender, Technology, Sexuality and Interlinks at Sexuality, Gender and Rights Institute (SGRI), 2022

In December, Body & Data facilitated a session on "Gender, Technology, Sexuality and Interlinks" at the Sexuality, Gender and Rights Institute (SGRI), 2022 hosted by Loom Nepal: an organization that aims to dismantle the power hierarchy, sustain activism, and reimagine feminist movement. Through the session, Kabita shared various intersectional aspects of the internet, safety, sexuality, gender and sexual exploration with young women and queer activists and communities who had grassroots experiences. The space also allowed the exchange of nuance experiences on gender and sexuality and skills and hacks around the internet and technology.


Martin Chautari Conference 2022

Chautari Conference, 2022 was an academic conference organized by Martin Chautari, Nepal where Body & Data presented a paper on "Unshackling Expression: Regulation of freedom of expression online and sexual expression in Nepal" by Shubha Kayastha and Kabita Bahing*. The paper was a critical analysis of Nepalese laws associated with Freedom of Expression online in Nepal that scrutinizes expression, sexual explorations and opinions online based on obscenity, morality, social decency and cultural harmony, national integrity, and security and its implication to the marginalized community of such laws and practices with the lens of women, queer and marginalized community.

The previous version of the study can be found here.


Asia 21 Young Leaders

Shubha from our team was selected to be part of Asia 21 Young leaders - the Class of 2022 and participated in this year’s annual summit in Tokyo, Japan during Nov 30 - Dec 4, 2022. The class of 2022 includes young leaders who are journalists, human rights advocates, entrepreneurs, fiction writers, politicians, and more.


Regional Convening on Feminist Digital Rights and Justice

Body & Data participated in a Regional Convening on Feminist Digital Rights and Justice in November. The objectives of the convening were to define digital rights and justice from a feminist perspective and map out advocacy spaces to build/strengthen movements demanding feminist digital rights and justice at a regional level.

Different women, marginalized persons and digital rights activists gathered from the South Asia Pacific regional level and discussed the issues of digital rights including escalating digital authoritarianism, online violence, the gig economy and its impact on women's livelihood etc. Rita from our team joined the convening, and collaboratively with other participants from Asia shared their experiences and observations of digital rights and their violations in their respective areas and space. The discussion also focused on how the idea of justice should be deconstructed holistically from the marginalized point of view.


ILGA Asia Conference 2022

Body & Data participated in their first ILGA Asia Conference 2022 with the theme of "Our Trials, Our Triumphs, And the Future We Demand" from 28 November - 2 December 2022 in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Queer rights activists and human rights defenders from Asia and the Pacific joined to discuss various issues such as LGBTQIA+ people in conflict & crisis: stories of survival and resistance, Faith, culture and LGBTQIA+ inclusion, Influencing laws and policies: National, regional and international advocacy for legal equality and justice, mainstreaming queer rights in the 2030 SDG agenda and more. While the major discussions covered queer rights as a whole, Body & Data's participation was important to look at queer rights from a holistic approach in intersecting digital rights and queer rights in a space where stories of hope and survival are often missed out.

Digital Rights Reading List

1. Access Denied: Gender Digital Divide As A Form Of Violence in South and Southeast Asia
2. Red Card on Digital Rights: A summary of Qatar’s foul plays
3. Meta Sued For Billions Of Dollars For Posts Alleged To Have Incited Violence In Ethiopia
4. [Opinion] Rich White Boys’ Takeover of Spaces of Organising: Should You Stay or Should You Go?
5. A Coy-Tale: Queer Cyber Intimacy And The Surveilled Subject

Upcoming Events around Digital Rights

1. Global dialogue: online gendered disinformation by UNESCO on 25 January 2023
2. Asia-Pacific Regional Consultation on the priority theme for the 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 67) by UNESCAP from 8 - 9 February 2023
3. Mozilla Festival (MozFest) from 20 - 24 March 2023
4. Asia Pacific Digital Rights Festival by EngageMedia from 22 - 26 May 2023
Established in 2017, Body & Data works to enhance understanding and access to information on digital rights among women, queer people and minority groups where they are able to exercise their rights in a safe and just digital space. We work towards the vision of accessible, safe and just digital space for all, through cross movement building, facilitation for access to information, knowledge building and dissemination on digital rights in the context of Nepal

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