In a new project with Dylan Mulvin, we explore how a reliance on consent—in sex and in data—can fail to prevent harm or achieve justice. Here’s a 5-minute summary of one of the key ideas we plan to explore in that book, for a CSCW 2022 panel:
New op ed about Mastodon
Nathan Schneider and I wrote this piece for Noema about Mastodon. To address online harm effectively, we’ll need to learn from transformative justice and restorative justice. How can we scale that? Subsidiarity!
Restorative justice and online harm
Here’s a presentation I gave for The Mint House this month, drawing on my work with Niloufar Salehi, Anna Gibson, and Nathan Schneider.
Restoring justice and transforming online communities
Lately my work has focused on thinking about how it could be possible to design online communities with the principles of restorative and transformative justice.
Rosalie Gillett interviewed me, Tarleton Gillespie, and Leigh Goodmark on these topics for a recent episode of Future Tense:
I’ve also presented parts of this new research at the “Community Driven Governance Online: Past, Present, and Future” workshop, which was organized by the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, at Annenberg’s Center for Media at Risk symposium, “Image-Based Abuse: Prevalence, Resistance, Prevention,” and at the Akasha event “Designing for moderating decentralized social networks.” A recording of my Akasha presentation is available below.
But how does all this scale? Nathan Schneider and I have a draft of a paper grappling with that question, “From Scalability to Subsidiarity in Addressing Online Harm.” Feedback on this work would be very welcome!
Privacy Camp Panel: “Can restorative justice help us govern online spaces?”
Here’s a summary of the talk from the European Digital Rights conference Privacy Camp 21 Panel: “Can restorative justice help us govern online spaces?”
Dr. Amy Hasinoff kicked off the session highlighting the shortcomings of a traditional content moderation approach, which offers some relief to victims but does not tackle the real underlying problems. Just like prison in the current criminal justice system removes the person who has done the harm from society, commercial content moderation performed by platforms is a punitive model where harmful content is simply removed. This process deprives people from understanding the conflicts. She then introduced the principles of restorative justice which take into account the needs of the person who did harm, the person who was harmed and the community. Finally she listed the conditions to apply restorative justice online: one must devote resources, support facilitators, allow openness and foster community transformation when the community has not yet integrated important values (such as gender equality).
Why “revenge porn” isn’t “revenge” and isn’t “porn” — virtual keynote
Thanks to LSE, Goldsmiths and City, University of London for hosting me for this virtual keynote at their PhD day event: New Directions in Feminist Thought.
Repairing online harm
I recently published an op ed with Niloufar Salehi and Anna Gibson about our project on restorative and transformative justice approaches to online harm.
And here’s Niloufar talking about the project at the Metagovernance Seminar; I pop in for Q&A too:
Sabbatical updates
I have just started a 10-month sabbatical fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany. In 2020, I will also be an ACLS fellow. This means I’ll be focusing entirely on research from August 2019 through December 2020.
Having just started my first sabbatical, I have to say I agree with Meagan Day’s argument in Jacobin that everyone should have one. This vision is of course even more radical than an academic sabbatical — Day wants us to have time off from all forms of work. Though I do hope to have time to read more novels, watch more TV, and travel more during my sabbatical, I also have lots of grand plans for new research projects.
One of the best things about getting tenure last year is that I feel less need to prioritize first- and single-authored publications. I now feel like I can be more open to hanging out in the middle of an author list, which can take my research in unexpected and exciting directions. While I’ve co-authored before, right now, all 5(!) of the projects I am currently working on are collaborative. One’s nearly in press, others are in the data-gathering phase, another is (hopefully) half-written, and another is merely a glimmer in our eyes and pages of incoherent notes.
Teaching and Trust
Reflecting on my year of experimenting with assessment as a thinq.studio fellow, I wrote this: Do you trust your students?
Article on revenge porn for Teen Vogue
Just out, a new article I wrote for Teen Vogue on revenge porn: “What to Do If You’re a Victim of Revenge Porn.”
Amy A. Hasinoff 