Defeating Gender Inequality · Disruptive Fridays #33
4PM CET (Berlin)
Live & online chat: https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
With Maya Talakhadze (Director, Regional Development Hub – Caucasus, GE), Ekaterine Khositashvili (Researcher, GE), Rasha Khayat (Writer, DE). Moderated by Elena Veljanovska (Disruption Network Lab, DE)
Live & online chat: https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
Gender inequality is a pressing issue in Georgia. The country is characterised by widespread inequalities affecting all aspects of collective and private life. Feminist thinking is not influential and being a feminist is still frowned upon, as traditional notions on the nature and gendered roles are up until now very common among the population. Despite the portrayal of gender equality in policy papers and media, affirmative content of legislations, the reality is different and discrimination against women often manifests itself in the form of femicide.
In partnership with the Regional Development Hub – Caucasus, the Disruption Network Lab is implementing a new project: “Defeating Gender Inequality”. Following the previous projects Hate News vs Free Speech (2020) and Facing Disinformation it aims to strengthen civil society cooperation, this time to further gender equality and female participation in each aspect of life.
The Georgian Equality index is in a steep decline. According to 2020 data, Georgia ranks 74th out of 153 countries in the Gender Equality Index, compared to 54th place in 2006. Despite the governmental efforts and measures, in the time of the pandemic, there is a growing number of restraining orders for domestic violence against women in 2021, with the numbers tripled compared to 2015. The situation is even more extreme for transgender, lesbian and queer women. The economic or political involvement of these women is an impossible task, in this case their visibility, health, and often, their lives are at stake.
In addition to that, women face problems with political and social participation, as well as economic independence due to patriarchal understanding of women’s role in society and public life. Georgia ranks 61st in terms of economic participation and 94th with political participation. Majority of the population believes that men make better political decisions. Only three of the 64 mayoral candidates nominated by the leading party in last year's election were women. Female candidates are underrepresented in party lists.
In the Georgian labour market, women are overrepresented in low-paying, low-skilled positions, regardless of their professional and academic qualifications, and salaries of women are lagging behind those of men. Sexual harassment is part of women’s daily routine, with the law on sexual harassment being ineffective in practice. The economic inequality is additionally reinforced by the tradition, where statistically, the main recipient of the inheritance is a man in the family and the women are left without any material support. In the family planning, males are still the preferred sex of the child for parents, with approximately 25,000 girls not being born as a result of selective abortions between 1990 and 2010. Additionally, the redistribution of family matters and unpaid care work falls entirely on women in almost every family.
Thus, prioritizing women empowerment is crucial in all aspects of private and public life, and working towards gender-equal environment is responsibility of each member of civil society. Especially in a context where feminist movements are being demonized, it is crucial to find alternative ways to raise awareness and political consciousness around these topics. Different methods from research to advocacy, from literature to movie making, civil society should be supported in their efforts to raise their voice.
In the course of August – December 2022, Maya Talakhadze and Ekaterine Khositashvili from RDH – Caucasus worked on researching current public information about all these aspects. In this edition we will speak about their findings and results, as well as how these results can be used in the future when creating new policies. Parallel to the research, they organised literature readings and movie screening by Georgian female authors. By using the subversive potential of art, they give voice and presence to these authors who are helping in the aim to empower women through an intersectional approach, create a more diverse environment, raise different types of issues, and include people from different social groups. The third speaker Rasha Khayat from Germany will present her particular way of fighting for gender equality through her work as a feminist writer, educator, translator, and someone behind the podcast Fempire – a space where female writers talk about their female writer heroes. She will additionally address the challenges of being a woman of colour and a writer in a male dominated world, but also the necessity to further address these issues in order to create better chances for other girls and women.
Speakers
Maya Talakhadze (Director, Regional Development Hub – Caucasus, GE)
Maya Talakhadze is Co-Founder and a director of Regional Development Hub - Caucasus. With the legal background, Maya has many years of experience in working in public, private and civil society organizations of different fields in Georgia and outside. She has worked on media environment and development in Georgia. For several years, she also worked as a researcher at the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information.
Ekaterine Khositashvili (Researcher, GE)
Ekaterine Khositashvili currently holds the position of researcher at the RDH – Caucasus. Prior to this, in 2018-2022, Khositashvili was working for the Permanent Mission of Georgia to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva, where she was in charge of human rights and gender equality, health, intellectual property and sectoral cooperation, covering the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Council, World Health Organization, and UN specialized agencies. Prior to that, she worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia with a focus on the US and EU integration. She received her MA with honours in International Economics (2010) and BA in Business Administration (2008) from Tbilisi State University. She also participated in a one-year training course in International Relations and European Integration organized by the Estonian School of Diplomacy and an executive training course for junior diplomats organized by the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna.
Rasha Khayat (Writer, DE)
Rasha Khayat grew up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and has been living in Germany from the age of 11. She writes novels and essays, hosts the feminist podcast Fempire – Women who Write. Her first novel „Weil wir längst woanders sind“ („Because we’re elsewhere now“) won her a number of accolades and was translated into multiple languages. She also translates and teaches creative writing. She writes for newspapers such as Die Zeit. Links: Literature, Instagram, Podcast
Elena Veljanovska (Disruption Network Lab, DE)
Elena Veljanovska is a curator and senior project manager at the Disruption Network Lab and Deputy Board Member of the Disruption Network Lab e. V.. From 2012 to 2019 she was the executive director and programme curator at Kontrapunkt Skopje, where with Iskra Geshoska she co-developed the Festival for Critical Culture - CRIC (founded in 2016). In 2006 she co-founded Line I+M Platform for New Media Art and Technology, where she was the artistic director until 2010. Veljanovska has worked as a curator and cultural manager with numerous organisations and individuals. From 2012 to 2014 she was actively involved in the development of the association of the independent cultural scene JADRO, in North Macedonia. In 2006 she graduates at the Art History and Archaeology Faculty in Skopje, N. Macedonia. Since 2014 she is based in Berlin.
This Disruptive Friday is part of the project Defeating Gender Inequality, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) as part of the the programme Expanding Cooperation with Civil Society in the Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia.
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Algorithms of Violence: Border Management, Migration & Enforced Discrimination · Disruptive Fridays #32
With Petra Molnar (Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab / Co-creator, Migration and Technology Monitor, CA/US), Martina Tazzioli (Reader in Politics & Technology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, IT/UK), Yasmine Boudiaf (Researcher & Technologist, DZ/UK). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director & Founder, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).
5PM CET (Berlin) · 11AM EST (New York)
Live & online chat: https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
Surveillance and monitoring technologies including cameras, drones, biometrics, and motion sensors have been implemented to increase the use of AI-controlled surveillance and data collection systems in different domains, from migration management, asylum seeking, to borders control. The second Disruptive Fridays of the SMART PRISONS series, leading to the Disruption Network Lab’s conference on tracking, monitoring and control in the context of prison and detention systems (March 24-26, 2023), focuses on the topics of technological violence and enforced discrimination towards migrants and minoritised groups. We are witnessing a degeneration of the use of AI in sensitive contexts in Europe and globally. Who gets to ask questions about proposed innovations and why are perspectives from the ground up relegated to the margins?
In this panel, Petra Molnar focuses on technological violence through high-risk experiments at the border. Practices of border violence increasingly rely on high-risk technological experiments. Predictive analytics used for interdictions, AI-power lie detectors and powerful sound cannons are just some of the more recent tools that states, private entities, and even international organisations use to manage migration. Certain places like borders serve as testing grounds for new technologies, because regulation and oversight is limited and an ‘anything goes’ frontier attitude informs the development and deployment of surveillance and automation. A growing multi-billion dollar border industrial complex also underpins the development and deployment of high-risk new technologies. Based on work in Europe, East Africa, and the US-Mexico border since 2018, this presentation attempts to foreground the lived experiences of people on the move as they are interacting with the sharpest edges of experimental border technologies. The issues around emerging technologies in the management of migration are not just about the inherent use of technology but rather about how it is used and by whom, with states and private actors setting the stage for what is possible and which priorities matter.
Martina Tazzioli’s presentation, “Infrastructural Clashes”, deals with techno-humanitarianism in refugee camps by drawing attention to the apparent clash between, on the one hand, the implementation of high-tech technologies justified for both keep track of asylum seekers and protecting them, and on the other misfunctioning or insufficient basic infrastructures – such as electricity and running water. Building on research fieldwork conducted in Greece, it contends that, however, far from being a paradoxical clash, the coexistence between systematic misfunctioning infrastructures and use of security technologies enhances modes of uneven and discretionary control. In the second part, it conceptualises infrastructural clashes in camps from the point of view of modes of capitalisation over lives which "extract more from less” (Neilson, Rossiter, 2022), that is which extract value from a politics of induced scarcity. An insight into modes of uneven control strengthened through infrastructural clashes enable crafting a critique of encampments which exposes the modes of choking refugees' lives and the obstruction of their autonomous spaces of liveability in camps.
Yasmine Boudiaf's project "Entanglements“ interrogates the relationship between states and technology companies. These relationships are lawful, yet can perpetuate violence towards minoritised groups. It is therefore important when describing these relationships and their effects on people to move away from the potentially sanitising framing of legality vs. illegality and to focus on the harms the technologies can inflict. The systematic, often unnoticed and seemingly harmless harvesting of individuals' data is being weaponised against minoritiesd groups. Enabled through partnerships between government bodies and private technology companies, we have seen tech solutionism, normalising language, lack of consent and obfuscation as neo-colonial behaviours of these entities of power, designed to maintain and extend that power. The presentation touches cases from NHS (UK National Health Service) contracting, biometric surveillance of 'criminal migrants' to financial support for gas bills as a way to police migrants.
Speakers
Petra Molnar (Associate Director, Refugee Law Lab / Co-creator, Migration and Technology Monitor, CA/US)
Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specialising in technology, migration, and human rights. She is the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and runs the Migration and Technology Monitor (https://www.migrationtechmonitor.com), a multilingual archive of work interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders. Petra is currently working on her first book, Artificial Borders: AI, Surveillance, and Border Tech Experiments (https://twitter.com/_PMolnar/status/1453410110689234945?s=20), and is a 2022-2023 Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Martina Tazzioli (Reader in Politics & Technology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, IT/UK)
Martina Tazzioli is Reader in Politics & Technology at Goldsmiths College, University of London (https://www.gold.ac.uk/politics-and-international-relations/staff/tazzioli-martina). She is the author of The Making of Migration. The biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders (2019), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015) and co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016). Her forthcoming book, "Border abolitionism: migration containment and the genealogies of struggles" (Manchester University Press) will come out in 2023. She is co-editor in chief of Politics Journal and on the editorial board of Political Geography- Open Research and of Radical Philosophy.
Yasmine Boudiaf (Researcher & Technologist, DZ/UK)
Yasmine Boudiaf is a researcher and creative technologist focusing on data, epistemology and the absurd. She was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ 2022. She produces art and research projects and consults on project design, strategy and public engagement. She is a fellow at the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Royal Society of Arts and is engaged in research and teaching at universities in the UK and Sweden.
https://yasmine-boudiaf.com
This Disruptive Friday is funded by Allianz Foundation, as part of the project “SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control” (July 1, 2022, to June 20, 2023), curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
Opening Prisons: Art as Investigation & Deconstruction of Carceral Spaces · Disruptive Fridays #31
With Sean Vegezzi (Visual Artist and Researcher, US) and Fiamma Montezemolo (Artist and Anthropologist, IT/US). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founder & Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE)
Live & online chat: https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
Part of the series SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control
This Disruptive Fridays launches a series of events heading to the SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control conference, that will take place on March 24-26 at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin. At the core is the investigation of recent developments in the creation of prisons and detention centres, with attention both on technical and ethical implications of tracking, monitoring and control.
New York based artist and researcher Sean Vegezzi introduces his investigative artistic project on an obscured part of New York City’s carceral infrastructure – as an artistic production commissioned by Disruption Network Lab, whose results will be presented at our conference during a keynote speech. The focus of his investigation is the Vernon C. Bain Center (VCBC), an 800-bed, 191-meter floating detention facility moored in the East River within the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. VCBC functions as an auxiliary of the Rikers Island jail complex and is the primary facility for the criminal court in the Bronx. Worldwide, it is the only floating structure that was ever purpose-built as a detention facility. Vegezzi’s work with Disruption Network Lab in 2022-2023 will present the history of this structure through a curated selection of archival materials gathered thus far, and a commissioned video installation that will bring the “ship” into more expansive public view from its current state of “offshore obscurity” (Mike Ricketts, 2015).
Sean Vegezzi’s talk for Disruptive Fridays starts with an extract of the film Edgelands: VCBC, made in collaboration with Laura Poitras and grassroots organization Take Back the Bronx / TBBX (IG, TW). Edgelands: VCBC is one three films in the Edgelands series. Through this film, Vegezzi and Poitras investigated a public health crisis aboard the vessel during the COVID-19 pandemic by intercepting radio transmissions from prison staff. The upcoming work with Disruption Network Lab will be based on discovered materials related to the construction of VCBC in the archives of Avondale, the now-defunct Louisiana-based shipbuilder contracted to create the facility. The archives include never-before-seen documentation of the facility’s interior, financial and budgeting records, and correspondences within the company. Furthermore, it will also support his ongoing legal inquiries about the current infrastructure implemented, and whether the facility uses smart technology.
Fiamma Montezemolo works at the intersection between contemporary art and anthropology, creating site-specific, interdisciplinary, and cross-genre interventions that build on her long-term exposure to borderlands and border zones. In this talk, she will focus on specific issues related to the border as a sign of confinement and the possibility of overthrowing its constraining connotation through certain acts of imagination. Montezemolo will present Project Perucatti, in which, working with architect and designer José Parral, she transformed the historical Santo Stefano prison on the island of Santo Stefano from an architectural center of power (the panopticon) into a volume populated with poetic still images. Located on an island, this ex-prison is notorious for its confinement of political dissidents. On a scale model of the prison, the artists have replaced the guard in the central tower with a digital screen, offering the viewer a stream of images inspired by the wishes and desires of prisoners.
Montezemolo will also discuss Exit Only, in which 'Exit Only’ is the Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History’s exit ticket. There are of course no entry tickets to the Museum. This exit ticket is valid only once per year: on March 9th. The date marks the anniversary of the first official exit from Guantanamo, in 2004, of the Tipton Three, the three British citizens from Tipton (England) who were held for two years by the US government in extrajudicial detention. The piece meditates on the deferred temporality of a facility whose promise to be closed never arrives, except for those in possession of the ‘Exit Only’ ticket. As more visitors deliberately choose to enter in possession of this yearly ticket and with it to access and create an art critical space, the emergency measures of wartime are gradually disabled.
Sean Vegezzi (Visual Artist and Researcher, US)
Sean Vegezzi is an artist and researcher who examines urban topographies through image-making, sculpture, and writing. Vegezzi's research studies spatial politics' effect on the individual, blending personal experience with narratives of autonomy, privacy, and security. Vegezzi’s work dreams of alternative models of living in cities, where undefined areas give a semblance of solitude, the limitations of the city-as-bureaucracy are exposed, the all-encompassing damage caused by over-development is reversed, and the mission-creep of security apparatuses into everyday life is undermined, reconfigured, or even inverted by its subjects. Recent exhibitions include Circles at Neue Berliner Kunstverein in collaboration with Laura Poitras. Circles featured a series of collaborative works titled Edgelands, which examined obscured nodes of New York City's violent carceral and policing infrastructure.
Fiamma Montezemolo (Artist and Anthropologist, IT/US)
Fiamma Montezemolo is both an artist (MFA, San Francisco Art Institute) and an anthropologist (PhD, University Orientale of Naples). She is an established scholar in border studies and Professor in the Department of Cinema & Digital Media at the University of California, Davis. She has exhibited in various institutions among which: Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2019), Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2019), Munich Jewish Museum, Germany (2019), La Galleria Nazionale, Roma (2019), Headlands Center for the Arts, California (2018), ASU Art Museum, Arizona (2019), Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2016), Armory Center for the Arts, Los Angeles (2014). She is represented by Magazzino gallery in Rome. She is widely published and the author of two monographs: on Zapatismo and on Chicano/a politics of representation, as well as co-author (with Rene’ Peralta and Heriberto Yepez) of Here is Tijuana (Blackdog Publishing, London, 2006) and co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Tijuana Dreaming, Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke U. Press, 2012).
Moderator:
Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director & Founder, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE)
Tatiana Bazzichelli is founder and director at Disruption Network Lab. Her focus of work is whistleblowing, network culture, art, and hacktivism. She is author of the books Whistleblowing for Change (2021), Networked Disruption (2013), Disrupting Business (2013), and Networking (2006). In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale festival in Berlin. She received a PhD degree in Information and Media Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Aarhus University in Denmark in 2011. Her PhD research, Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking, was the result of her 2009 visiting scholarship at the H-STAR Institute of Stanford University. In 2019-2021 she was appointed jury member for the Capital Cultural Fund by the German Federal Government and the city of Berlin, and in 2020-2022 jury member for the Kulturlichter prize, a new award for digital cultural education in Germany.
This Disruptive Friday is funded by Allianz Kulturstiftung, as part of the project “SMART PRISONS: Tracking, Monitoring & Control” (July 1, 2022, to June 20, 2023), curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
Corruption in the Global Arms Trade: Drawing New Connections · Disruptive Fridays #30
With: Julia Auf dem Brinke (Co-Founder & Programme Manager, Corruption Tracker), B. Arneson (Research Coordinator, Corruption Tracker).
Live at https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
In this Disruptive Friday session, Julia Auf dem Brinke in conversation with B. Arneson will discuss the detrimental effects of corruption in the global arms trade on democratic systems, the mechanisms that sustain the military-industrial complex, and the socio-economic opportunity costs of corruption. In addition, Julia and B. will highlight the importance of skills-sharing, intersectional coalition building, and activism as paths forward.
As the most corrupt business sector globally, the arms trade drains resources from the people and drives conflicts across the world. The Corruption Tracker Project (CT) seeks to shine a light into the shadows of this world’s most secretive and deadly industry by providing a database of corruption cases within the global arms trade in one place. CT aims to be a useful resource for anyone looking for quick, well-researched facts on an individual corruption case, as well as for those looking to identify patterns across a number of deals.
Equally important, the CT fosters knowledge exchange and coalition building, particularly empowering young activists, researchers, and journalists to obtain the tools to critically examine corrupt practices and to draw the connection as to how this intersects with their lived experience as well as activism.
Julia Auf dem Brinke is a co-founder and programme manager for the Corruption Tracker project, where she works on bringing together activists, academics, and journalists to tackle the detrimental effect of corruption within the global arms trade. She is also part of the Forum on Arms Trade´s Emerging Experts 2021/2022 cohort. Julia holds an MSc from SOAS in Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice, and previously worked at the International Peace Bureau, SCRAP Weapons and the Center of Conflict, Rights and Justice (SOAS). Her research and advocacy work focuses on arms trade, corruption, and the military-industrial complex.
B. Arneson is a Research Coordinator for the Corruption Tracker and an Outreach Coordinator for the World Peace Foundation's program, "Defense Industries, Foreign Policy, and Armed Conflict." She is also the Founder of Paperbacks for Perpetrators, a project that provides books to individuals who are incarcerated in the US. B got her MSc in the Politics of Conflict, Rights, and Justice at SOAS, University of London. Her previous research and grassroots organizing has focused on LGBTQ+ rights, the occupation of Palestine, drone warfare in the MENA region, and the US prison-industrial complex.
The event is part of the Disruption Network Lab programme series Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices funded by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) as commissioned by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Earlier episodes
Beef, Banks & the Brazilian Amazon: Using Geospatial Data to Investigate Deforestation · Disruptive Fridays #29
February 25 2022 · 3PM CET · ✚ gCal ✚ iCal
Sam Leon (Head of Data Investigations, Global Witness, UK) and Louis Goddard (Senior Data Investigations Adviser, Global Witness, UK).
Part of the Disruption Network Lab programme series Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices
This Disruptive Fridays discusses the the impact of corruption in relation to environmental damage. Focus will be the role of Brazilian beef companies in driving the climate crisis and the role of big-name banks and investors in driving tropical deforestation.
Cattle farming is a major driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, with the 'big three' international beef trading companies continuing to source cows from farms implicated in illegal forest clearance. Over the past two years, Global Witness has been working directly with Brazilian state government data and information collected by local NGOs to map these companies' supply chains in unprecedented detail, revealing tens of thousands of hectares of illegal deforestation and blowing holes in the 'deforestation-free' narrative promulgated by the companies' official audits.
In this session, Louis Goddard will discuss the specific data analysis techniques underlying Global Witness's Amazon work, the broader data ecosystem around deforestation in Brazil, and opportunities for future investigative work in this area. The session is moderated by Sam Leon, Head of Data Investigations at Global Witness.
SPEAKERS:
Louis Goddard (Senior Data Investigations Adviser, Global Witness, UK)
Louis Goddard is a Senior Data Investigations Adviser at the campaign group Global Witness, where he applies computational techniques to generate investigative leads. In addition to tropical deforestation, his work currently covers rare earth mining and the fossil gas industry. Before Global Witness, Louis worked as a data journalist at The Times of London and did a PhD in contemporary poetry. www.globalwitness.org
Sam Leon (Head of Data Investigations, Global Witness, UK)
Sam Leon started Global Witness’s Data Investigations Team in 2016. Since then he has overseen a range of data-driven research from anti-money laundering investigations into anonymously owned property in London to exposés on how major banks are financing tropical deforestation. His work now focusses on using computational techniques to challenge and expose the corporations driving the climate crisis.
The event is part of the Disruption Network Lab programme series Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices funded by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) as commissioned by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Inequalities in COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution ·
Disruptive Fridays #28
January 28, 2022, 3pm CET
With: Sarai Keestra and Till Bruckner.
Increasing transparency in the funding of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Sarai Keestra (MD/PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, Member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines – UAEM, NL/UK) and Till Bruckner (PhD, Founder, TranspariMED, UK).
The AstraZeneca vaccine is the world's most widely distributed COVID-19 vaccine, being used in 178 countries and territories. This versatile vaccine platform, which may have important applications beyond COVID-19, is the result of two decades of research at the University of Oxford. In 2020 a group of medical students and early career researchers from the global student network Universities Allied for Essential Medicines came together with the goal of increasing transparency and public accountability in the funding base of this research. Their research revealed that the great majority of the early vaccine development at the University of Oxford was funded by charitable organisations and the public sector. These findings, which were recently published in the BMJ Global Health (https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/12/e007321) contributed the discourse around global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines and sparked debate around the terms of the commercialisation of the publicly funded vaccine research at the University. Using Freedom of Information Requests, they also gained access to the technology transfer agreement between Oxford and AstraZeneca,shedding new light on the implementation of access commitments during a pandemic. In this Disruptive Friday session we will learn more about inequalities in COVID-19 vaccine distribution and using freedom of information requests to increase transparency from public institutions.
SPEAKERS:
Sarai Keestra is a MD/PhD student at the University of Amsterdam and a member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM). UAEM is a global student network promoting access to health technologies such as vaccines or medicines, by changing our universities’ research, patenting, and licensing decisions. Within UAEM Sarai focusses on equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, clinical trial transparency, and university technology transfer. She was UAEM UK's national coordinator between 2018-2019 and at the start of the pandemic co-led UAEM UK‘s national campaign on COVID-19 health technologies. Before studying medicine, Sarai worked as a research assistant in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Till Bruckner is the founder of TranspariMED, a campaign that works to end evidence distortion in medicine. He is passionate about using advocacy to achieve real, measurable impact in improving the world. He previously worked for the AllTrials campaign, the Transparify campaign, the anti-corruption group Transparency International, and for various NGOs and think tanks in the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Northwest Africa. Till holds a PhD in political science from the University of Bristol.
The event is part of the Disruption Network Lab programme series Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices funded by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) as commissioned by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Disinformation is a Virus · Fake News & the Pandemic · Disruptive Fridays #27
December 10 2021, 3PM CET
With: Ketevan Khutsisvili, Ivan Sigal, Tina Lee, Maya Talakhadze
For the final event of the exchange project with The Regional Democratic Hub Caucasus, FACING DISINFORMATION: Media Diversity from Georgia to Germany Disruption Network Lab organises a conversation on the topics of media disinformation during coronavirus in Georgia, Germany and internationally.
Ketevan Khutsishvili (Deputy Editor at Myth Detector, Media Development Foundation in Tbilisi) will be in conversation with Ivan Sigal (Global Voices Executive Director) and Tina Lee (Editor-in-chief of Unbias the News, and head of publications at cross-border journalism network Hostwriter). The panel is moderated by Maya Talakhadze (Co-Founder of Regional Democratic Hub – Caucasus).
The event is curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founder & Director, Disruption Network Lab).
This conversation aims to discuss the development of disinformation and fake news in Georgia and internationally, taking into consideration the COVID-19 threat. The creation of hate news, fake news and false facts in the media landscape in relation to the pandemic is analysed to discuss methodologies of encouraging and supporting media pluralism.
Ketevan Khutsishvili analyses how fake news is spread in Georgia on the roots of COVID-19 and on vaccinations; the engagement of Russian sources in the COVID-19 disinformation; disinformation on Lugar laboratory and the case of generating fake COVID passports.
Ivan Sigal introduces the activity of The Civic Media Observatory, a method to investigate and decode how people understand information and create knowledge in complex and seemingly chaotic media ecosystems. Over the last two years, the Civic Media Observatory has explored complexity in media ecosystems in two dozens countries, on topics ranging from elections to COVID-19, from protest movements to civil wars, from China's soft power influence around the world, to disinformation tactics by authoritarians. Current active projects for 2021 and early 2022 include observatories about Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Mali, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia and Turkey.
Tina Lee presents the work of Unbias the News, a cross-border newsroom working towards a more equitable and inclusive world of journalism, and discusses how lack of diversity and local voices in the media assists the spread of disinformation, using examples from the German context and from Nigeria’s vaccine hesitancy. She will argue that missing voices in the media create information gaps that can be filled by distortion and disinformation, and that the solution is a more inclusive media landscape.
The conversation aims to connect the experience in South Caucasus region with the current analysis of media disinformation and hate speech developed by journalists, researchers and media experts in Germany and internationally, to provide literacy and awareness in complex public health issues.
Speakers
Ketevan Khutsishvili (Deputy Editor at Myth Detector, Media Development Foundation, GE)
Ketevan Khutsishvili is a fact-checker and journalist, Deputy Editor at Myth Detector, Media Development Foundation in Tbilisi, Georgia. Myth Detector is Media Development Foundation’s (MDF) project aimed at debunking fake news and studying propaganda methods and strategies revealed in Georgian language media.Since November 2019, Myth Detector is a verified signature of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) of the Poynter Institute, working alongside with 100 fact-checkers from more than 70 countries around the world and member of #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance and WhatsApp Coronavirus Information Hub.
Ivan Sigal (Global Voices Executive Director, US)
Ivan Sigal is Global Voices’ executive director since the middle of 2008. Prior to working with GV, he spent 10 years working in media development in the former Soviet Union and Asia, supporting and training journalists and working on media co-productions. He is also a photographer, and have worked and travelled in 80 countries. In 2012 he published White Road, a chronicle of travel in Central Asia. He is currently also a Fellow in Digital Studies at the U.S. Library of Congress, and a former fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where he studied digital storytelling and online communities. He speaks Russian, manage in German, have forgotten Slovak and Czech, and can make it home in Thai.
Tina Lee (Editor-in-chief of Unbias the News, Head of Publications at Hostwriter)
Tina Lee is writer, editor and researcher focused on migration, media and the far-right. She is head of publications at Hostwriter, an award-winning network that helps journalists easily connect across borders. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Unbiasthenews.org, a cross-border feminist newsroom based in Berlin, and was the editor of the book Unbias the News: Why Diversity Matters for Journalism, published by Hostwriter and Correctiv in 2019.
Maya Talakhadze (Co-founder, Regional Democratic Hub – Caucasus, GE)
Maya Talakhadze is Co-Founder of Regional Democratic Hub - Caucasus. With a legal background, Maya has many years’ experience in working public, private and civil society organizations in different fields in Georgia, in the US and in the Netherlands. She has worked on media environment and development in Georgia. For several years, she also worked as a researcher at Institute for Development of Freedom of Information. Experienced with project management, within the company she is also responsible for organizational development and relation to donors and development partners.
The project ‘Facing Disinformation’ is undertaken with the financial support of the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) as part of the Expanding Cooperation with Civil Society in the Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia (Eastern Partnership Programme).
Disruptive Fridays - Live Streaming Series
Feel free to tweet about #DisruptiveFridays by @disruptberlin - streaming weekly on disruptionlab.org/fridays! Invite friends to watch & participate!
When we named our organisation "Disruption Network Lab" we would have never imagined that disruption would turn out the way we experienced it during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the course of the past years we have invited people that disrupt and challenge closed systems from within. In a moment in which we experieced a deep closure, Disruptive Fridays became an opportunity to foster even more critical thinking. These live conversations address topics related to art, hacktivism, whistleblowing, social justice and collective care in times of corona. The series started in April 2020 and developed regularly throughout the following months.