Joana Varon

Joana Varon is the Brazilian researcher, activist, and feminist-tech founder who has anchored the public-facing leadership of Coding Rights — the Rio de Janeiro-headquartered Brazilian feminist think-and-do tank she founded in 2015 — as its Executive Directress and self-described "Creative Chaos Catalyst" (see Person entry). She is tracked here as a Voice because her sustained named-byline public output — the Oppressive A.I. essay (26 April 2021); the Not My A.I.: Towards Critical Feminist Frameworks to Resist Oppressive A.I. Systems Carr Center Discussion Paper (Harvard Kennedy School, 17 October 2022); the Artificial intelligence and consent: a feminist anti-colonial critique Internet Policy Review article (December 2021); the Decolonising AI: A transfeminist approach to data and social justice chapter in Global Information Society Watch 2019: Artificial Intelligence; the named-byline essay register at Branch magazine (Climate Action Tech); the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies speculative-design workshop methodology she co-conceived with Sasha Costanza-Chock; the multi-year named-talk record on her own lectures-and-workshops archive; and the co-initiation of the Human Rights Considerations working group at the IETF — carries the working argument that the prior questions about an AI system are not how to make it fair, transparent, or human-centric but "why build it?", "is it really needed?", "who profits?", and "who loses?", and that those questions are best read through feminist, decolonial, and antiracist analytical categories grounded in Latin American empirical case material.

The Voice anchors four movement-area registers that the corpus's voices slice had previously left empty.

• The first feminist-tech / transfeminist voice anchor. The corpus's voices slice had previously run regulatory-policy (Ella Jakubowska), watchdog-research-and-audit (Matthias Spielkamp, Joy Buolamwini), strategic-litigation (Cori Crider, Mercy Mutemi), policy-research (Reema Patel, Alix Dunn), researcher-organiser (Timnit Gebru), and youth-organiser (Sneha Revanur) registers, with the Latin American voices (Juan Carlos Lara, Jamila Venturini) anchored on the empirical-research-and-multilateral-advocacy register at Derechos Digitales — but no feminist-tech / transfeminist voice anywhere. Varon anchors that register from inside Coding Rights and routes it through the Not My A.I. feminist-toolkit programme, the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies speculative-design methodology, the Chupadados investigative-journalism collaboration, and the transfeministech.org / chupadados.com / Safer Nudes / Net of Rights creative-artefact register through which Coding Rights pairs technical analysis with cultural production.
• The first Brazilian / Portuguese-language Voice anchor. With Jamila Venturini anchored on the Chile-headquartered Derechos Digitales register and producing primarily in Spanish, the corpus's voices slice had no Brazilian / Portuguese-language voice anchor — despite Brazil being the largest Lusophone country in the Latin American digital-rights field and the home of one of the region's most distinctive feminist-tech research programmes. Varon's named-byline register runs trilingually (Portuguese, English, Spanish) across the Chupadados trilingual investigative-journalism collaboration, the Oppressive A.I. framework, the Decolonising AI GISWatch chapter, the Branch magazine feminist-tech-and-climate essay register, and the multi-year talks-and-keynotes archive — and anchors the Brazilian Portuguese-language presence as a counterpart to the Spanish-language Derechos Digitales / Al Sur voices register.
• The first Coding Rights Voice anchor. Coding Rights is in corpus with Varon named as Founder Executive Directress but without a corresponding Voice entry until this draft. The org-side body identifies the four principal programme anchors (the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, Not My A.I., Chupadados, and the #SaiDaMinhaCara facial-recognition policy-advocacy campaign), the Al Sur consortium membership, and the named publication / artefact register; the Voice anchors the named-individual public-output side of that posture, including the Oppressive A.I. and Carnegie Carr Center framework restatements, the Internet Policy Review consent-and-anti-colonial article, the Branch feminist-tech-and-climate essay register, and the international-talks-and-keynotes archive on Varon's own site.
• The founder-executive-and-essayist-with-creative-methodology-track sub-type. Structurally distinct from the corpus's existing voice anchors on litigators (Cori Crider, Mercy Mutemi), lawyer-founder-and-columnists (Apar Gupta), Public Policy and Research leadership lawyers (Juan Carlos Lara), journalist-researchers (Jamila Venturini), Brussels-secretariat policy spokespeople (Ella Jakubowska), watchdog-research executive directors (Matthias Spielkamp), convener-and-essayists (Mohamad Najem), lawyer-host-publicists (Katarzyna Szymielewicz), inclusionist-and-rights-advocates (Gbenga Sesan), and researcher-organisers (Timnit Gebru), Varon's distinctive register is the founder-executive whose public output runs as a combined essay-and-academic-paper track (the Oppressive A.I. framework, the Carr Center Discussion Paper, the Internet Policy Review consent article, the GISWatch chapters, the Branch essays), a creative-methodology track (the Oracle deck, Chupadados, Safer Nudes, the Una Bolsa de Semillas speculative-feminist-science-fiction anthology), and an international-talks-and-workshops track from the 2015 IGF João Pessoa opening onward — the structural position from which feminist-tech methodology is itself treated as political work, not as an artefact category that the political work sits separately from.

Public output and venues

Varon's public-facing work runs through five overlapping channels.

• The Not My A.I. and Oppressive A.I. framework track. The named-byline analytical anchor of Varon's English-and-Spanish-language register is the Oppressive A.I.: Feminist Categories to Understand its Political Effects essay, co-authored with Paz Peña and first published on 26 April 2021, which proposes a seven-category political-power diagnostic — surveillance of the poor, embedded racism, patriarchal by design, colonial extractivism of data bodies and territories, automation of neoliberal policies, precarious labour, and lack of transparency — for reading whether a deployed or proposed AI system should exist at all rather than how to make it incrementally fairer. The framework was restated in the Not My A.I.: Towards Critical Feminist Frameworks to Resist Oppressive A.I. Systems Carr Center Discussion Paper at Harvard Kennedy School (17 October 2022), produced under Varon's 2020-21 Technology and Human Rights Fellowship at the Carr Center, and again in the peer-reviewed Artificial intelligence and consent: a feminist anti-colonial critique Internet Policy Review article (Volume 10 Issue 4, 7 December 2021, DOI 10.14763/2021.4.1602). Across the three artefacts, the running argument is that "the more oppressed you are by systems maintaining the status quo of cisheteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism, the less power you have, and the less meaningful your consent is likely to be", and that the prior questions for any deployed AI system are "why build it?", "is it really needed?", "who profits?", and "who loses?".
• Essay-and-chapter register on data colonialism, decolonisation, and feminist tech. Varon's named-byline essay register beyond the Oppressive A.I. framework runs through three principal venues. The Decolonising AI: A transfeminist approach to data and social justice chapter, co-authored with Paz Peña for Global Information Society Watch 2019: Artificial Intelligence: Human Rights, Social Justice and Development and republished on the Coding Rights Medium (3 March 2020), anchors the data-colonialism vocabulary on the empirical case of Argentina's Plataforma Tecnológica de Intervención Social ("86 per cent accuracy" teenage-pregnancy prediction system) and the through-line proposition that AI systems deployed in Latin America encode discrimination under the guise of objectivity. The Branch magazine (Climate Action Tech) named-byline essay register includes "Compost Engineers and Sus Saberes Lentos: A Manifest for Regenerative Technologies" (Issue 9, with Lucía Egaña Rojas) on technologies of life rooted in decolonial-feminist-ecological principles, "Big Tech Goes Green(washing): Feminist Lenses to Unveil New Tools in the Master's Houses" (Issue 2, with Camila Nobrega and Michelle Thorne), and the bilingual interview with Indigenous leader Alana Manchineri "The climate change situation is being handled like treating a large, deep cut with a Band-Aid" (Issue 6). The GISWatch contributor profile records the two GISWatch chapter contributions (2019 Decolonising AI and 2020 Big tech goes green(washing)) through which the data-colonialism and climate-and-tech feminist arguments enter the international civil-society research record.
• Reports and protocol-standards register. Varon's wider research-and-publications archive includes the OONI / Coding Rights / Women on Waves / Women on Web report Sobre o bloqueio dos sites pelo direito de escolha Women on Waves e Women on Web (October 2019), co-authored with the Open Observatory of Network Interference researchers Maria Xynou, Federico Ceratto, and Arturo Filastò and with Rebecca Gomperts of Women on Waves and Women on Web; The ability to say NO on the Internet with Paz Peña under Privacy International support; Data as a tool for political influence in the Brazilian elections; a joint contribution to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women on online gender-based violence; the State of Privacy Brazil report under Privacy International's national-jurisdiction series; and the IETF Internet Drafts on Human Rights Considerations for Standards and Protocols through which Coding Rights's methodological work has entered international internet-governance standards venues — the report-and-protocol-standards side of the public-output footprint that complements the essay-and-framework register.
• Creative-artefact track: the Oracle, Chupadados, Safer Nudes, Una Bolsa de Semillas. Varon's distinctive register inside the feminist-tech voice slice is that her public output runs not only as named-byline essays and academic papers but as creative-and-speculative artefacts in their own right. The Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies — concept and coordination by Varon and Sasha Costanza-Chock in partnership with the Design Justice Network, with design and illustration by Clarote — is an interactive five-deck card-game workshop methodology whose stated purpose is to "collectively envision and share ideas for transfeminist technologies from the future". The Chupadados ("data-suckers") project commissions Latin American journalists and academics for trilingual investigative-journalism stories on data extraction in urban space, the home, the body, and finances. The Safer Nudes digital-security zine and the Una Bolsa de Semillas: Ciencia Ficción Feminista en Abya Yala speculative-feminist-science-fiction Spanish-language anthology are the other named anchors of the cultural-production track. Across all four artefacts, the methodological argument is that the imaginative work of figuring out what better technologies might look like is itself political work, not preliminary or supplementary to the policy-advocacy register that runs in parallel.
• International talks-and-keynotes and podcast register. Varon's recurring international-talks-and-workshops register, archived publicly on her own site, spans the Internet Governance Forum 2015 João Pessoa opening, the IETF Tokyo 2015 "Net of Rights" plenary film presentation, the Re:publica Berlin 2016 "Digital Colonialism: a global overview" keynote, MozFest London 2017 "Chupadados, the hidden faces of our beloved technologies", the Wikimedia South Africa 2018 "Decolonizing the Internet" keynote, the MIT Data+Feminism Lab 2020 "Speculative TransFeminist Futures" presentation, the Ford Tech Policy Fellows 2020 "Oracle for Transfeminist Futures" workshop, the Science Po Paris 2020 "Chaire Villes et numérique" lecture on urban surveillance, the IGF 2020 "Future Unclear: data and bodies in the post-pandemic times" session, and multiple RightsCon participations through 2022. The podcast track is anchored on the ifa "Die Kulturmittler" English-edition episode "Digital Technology and Human Rights" through which the proposition that "to protect democracies and minorities online, we need to diversify technology and depart from the idea of universal software solutions" enters the German foreign-cultural-policy listening publics.

Signature framings

Five formulations recur across Varon's public output and have done the most to install her register into the Latin American and international feminist-tech and digital-rights field.

• "Why build it? Is it really needed? Who profits? Who loses?" — the prior-political-question framing. Varon's Carr Center Discussion Paper with Paz Peña argues that ethical-AI frameworks concentrated on transparency and accountability "miss the larger picture of systemic oppression" and that the prior questions for any AI system deployment are "why build it?", "is it really needed?", "who profits?", and "who loses?". The framing — running through the Not My A.I. project toolkit, the Oppressive A.I. seven-category framework, and the Carr Center discussion paper — installs the position that the political question of whether to deploy AI at all is prior to the technical question of how to do it fairly, and is the load-bearing line through which Coding Rights's wider Latin American feminist-tech argument enters the international digital-rights and AI-governance field.
• "Data colonialism" — the consent-and-extraction framing. Varon's Internet Policy Review article with Paz Peña proposes that "while violent domination characterized ancient colonization, data colonialism uses neoliberal and individualistic approaches to consent as one of its subtle tools for domination", and that "the more oppressed you are by systems maintaining the status quo of cisheteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism, the less power you have, and the less meaningful your consent is likely to be". The framing reads the Digital Welfare State and the wider AI-deployment register as the contemporary extractive successor to historical colonialism — situated in Latin American empirical case material on social-protection-system AI deployment — and supplies the conceptual register through which the Coding Rights / Not My A.I. line is articulated in the academic-policy register.
• "Transfeminism" as epistemological framework. Varon's Decolonising AI GISWatch chapter with Paz Peña proposes "transfeminism" as the epistemological framework through which to reimagine technology development — an approach that recognises "different layers of oppression caused by race, class, gender, religion and other aspects of intersectionality" — and quotes Cathy O'Neil on the proposition that "models are opinions embedded in mathematics" to anchor the argument that AI reflects creator values rather than neutrality. The framing is the substantive ground for the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies methodology and the wider Coding Rights transfeminist-decolonial-antiracist self-statement, and is the corpus's clearest single anchor on the transfeminist analytical vocabulary inside the make-AI-good movement's voices register.
• "What if our technologies are meant to be local, situated, non-scalable, but interoperable?" — the regenerative-technologies framing. Varon's Coding Rights interview with Julia Kloiber (10 October 2023) on the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies proposes that "the Oracle is not a tech solutionist deck, it is not meant to encourage ideas that depart from the belief that tech by itself can solve our historical problems" and asks "what if our technologies are meant to be local, situated, non-scalable, but interoperable?". The framing — extended into the Branch magazine "Compost Engineers and Sus Saberes Lentos" manifest for regenerative technologies and the bilingual Alana Manchineri interview — installs the proposition that the political alternative to the scaled-Silicon-Valley-platform model is not better scaled platforms but situated, ancestral, ecologically-grounded technologies whose primary criterion is regeneration rather than growth.
• "Hacking the patriarchy" — the Coding Rights house line. The single-line framing carried as the Coding Rights site banner — "Hacking the patriarchy" — anchors Varon's public-facing register on the proposition that feminist-tech work is itself adversarial technical and political practice against the structural arrangement of who builds, deploys, and benefits from technology, rather than ameliorative practice within the structural arrangement as given. Across her public-talks register from 2015 onward, the framing is the through-line that makes the four other framings legible as a single posture.

Organisational vehicle

Varon's public output runs primarily through Coding Rights, the Rio de Janeiro-headquartered Brazilian feminist think-and-do tank she founded in 2015 and continues to lead as Executive Directress. The organisation's project portfolio — the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, Not My A.I., Chupadados, and the #SaiDaMinhaCara facial-recognition policy-advocacy campaign — is the substantive subject matter Varon's named-byline essay, talks, and creative-artefact registers carry to wider Latin American and international publics, while the Al Sur consortium membership anchors the regional-coordination side. Outside Coding Rights, Varon's 2020-21 Technology and Human Rights Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and her continuing Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society affiliation at Harvard route her work into Global North academic-policy circuits; her A+ Alliance participation anchors the cross-organisational feminist-AI-principles-for-Latin-America line alongside María Paz Canales and Jamila Venturini; and her co-initiation of the Human Rights Considerations working group at the IETF anchors the internet-standards governance track through which the Coding Rights methodological work enters the protocol-standards layer.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Varon's public-facing output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: the Oppressive A.I. seven-category political-power framework that has installed the Latin American feminist-decolonial vocabulary on AI deployment into the international digital-rights and AI-governance field; the Carr Center Discussion Paper restating the same framework through the Harvard Kennedy School publisher; the Internet Policy Review consent-and-anti-colonial article that has installed the data-colonialism vocabulary in the peer-reviewed register; the Decolonising AI GISWatch chapter and the Branch magazine feminist-tech-and-climate essay register; the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, Chupadados, Safer Nudes, and Una Bolsa de Semillas creative-artefact register through which feminist-tech methodology is itself treated as political work; the international talks-and-workshops register from the 2015 IGF opening onward; the ifa "Die Kulturmittler" and other international podcast appearances; and the IETF Human Rights Considerations working-group co-initiation through which the substantive framings — "data colonialism", "transfeminism as epistemological framework", "why build it? who profits? who loses?", "local, situated, non-scalable, but interoperable", "hacking the patriarchy" — have entered the international feminist-tech, digital-rights, and AI-governance field. The corpus's voices slice carried no feminist-tech / transfeminist anchor, no Brazilian / Portuguese-language anchor, no Coding Rights anchor, and no founder-executive-and-essayist-with-creative-methodology-track sub-type before this entry; this entry gives all four their first first-person voice. Affiliation and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.