This talk will explore the disruptive and transformative effects of digital technology on gendered security asymmetries in Greenland. Through extended ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Greenland and Denmark, research findings emerged through in-depth interviews, collaborative mappings and field observations with 51 participants. Employing a critical feminist lens, the paper identifies how Greenlandic women develop digital security practices to respond to Greenland's ecologically, politically and socially induced transformation processes. By connecting individual security concerns of Greenlandic women with the broader regional context, the findings highlight how digital technology has created transitory spaces in which collective security is cultivated, shaped and challenged. The contribution to security scholarship is therefore threefold: (1) identification and acknowledgement of gendered effects of increased usage of digital technology in remote and hard-to-reach communities, (2) a broader conceptualisation of digital security and (3) a recommendation for more contextualised, pluralistic digitalisation design.
This talk is based on: Wendt, Nicola, Rikke Bjerg Jensen and Lizzie Coles-Kemp. "Civic Empowerment through Digitalisation: the Case of Greenlandic Women." In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI'20, New York, 2020. ACM Press.
Nicola is a PhD candidate supervised across the Information Security Group (Dr Rikke Bjerg Jensen) and the Geography Department (Prof Klaus Dodds) at Royal Holloway and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. In her PhD she focuses on identity formation within an increasingly digitalised public sphere in Greenland and, through this, explores gendered notions of security. Ethnographic in nature and using community-based participatory research methods, Nicola’s research investigates the intersection of digital technology and social practices, looking at how experiences of technological transitions are negotiated against a backdrop of historic and contemporary inequalities. She received her BA in International Relations from the University of Groningen and her MA from the Universities of Uppsala and Strasbourg.