"The Personal is Political": Hackathons as Feminist Consciousness Raising
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3415221.pdf
Description
Published version
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Author(s)
D'Ignazio, Catherine
Michelson, Rebecca
Hope, Alexis
Hoy, Josephine
Roberts, Jennifer
Krontiris, Kate
Date Issued
October 2020
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
D'Ignazio, Catherine, Michelson, Rebecca, Hope, Alexis, Hoy, Josephine, Roberts, Jennifer et al. 2020. ""The Personal is Political": Hackathons as Feminist Consciousness Raising." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4 (CSCW2).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Initially conceived as problem-focused programming events, hackathons have expanded to encompass a range
of issue areas, stakeholders and activities. There have been important critiques of hackathons in relation
to their format and structure, their epistemological assumptions, and their outputs and impacts. Scholars
working in Feminist HCI have proposed design considerations for more inclusive hackathons that focus on
social justice outcomes for marginalized groups. Evaluative work on hackathons has assessed entrepreneurial
contributions, skill development, and affective impacts, but largely absent from the analysis is a view of longterm personal impacts on participants. What kinds of lasting impacts (if any) do issue-focused hackathons
have on participants themselves? In this paper, we describe a post-hoc qualitative study with participants and
organizers of a postpartum health hackathon in the U.S., one year after the event took place. Our goals were
to understand people’s motivations for participating, what impact (if any) their participation had on their
lives, and how (if at all) their participation shaped how they now understand postpartum health. Our findings
indicate that the hackathon functioned as a space of "feminist consciousness raising" in that it provided
space for navigating and sharing personal experiences, contextualizing and connecting those experiences to
structural oppression, and developing participants’ self- and collective-efficacy to create design interventions
and enact social change. Feminist consciousness raising is not just "awareness-raising", but rather a specific
historic and contemporary practice which we describe and situate in relation to personal experiences of
oppression around stigmatized topics. With these findings, we situate feminist consciousness raising in relation
to the literature on hackathons and Feminist HCI, speculate which aspects of the design of the event led to
it fostering feminist consciousness raising, and generate recommendations for how to intentionally bring
feminist consciousness raising to the design of hackathons and innovation events.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Civic Media
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3415221
