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2016: The seed was planted
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In September 2016, the dream to create a campaign to center the knowledges of marginalized communities online became a reality at the AWID Forum in Bahia, Brazil. Read about how it all started.
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2017 was the year of dreaming big. Our co-founders Anasuya Sengupta and Siko Bouterse expanded our feminist collective by bringing on Adele Godoy Vrana as our third co-founder. The trio was determined to build the team’s capacity so we could start working on new initiatives, such as #VisibleWikiWomen and the first Decolonize the Internet conference.
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From the very start, we supported members of the Kumeyaay and Shoshone Indigenous nations, Dalit feminist and Bosnia and Herzegovina LGBTIQA+ communities to bring their knowledges online, especially to Wikipedia.
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2018 was a year of so many firsts for Whose Knowledge?. We piloted the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign to increase women, trans and non-binary people visibility on Wikipedia. It was one of our most intense editions in which we reached 10 times our imagined impact! Read more.
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Together with members of the Kumeyaay and Shoshone Indigenous nations, Dalit feminist and Bosnia and Herzegovina LGBTIQA communities, we co-authored our first resource series! “Our Stories, Our Knowledges” is a set of guides, tools, and practices to help center the knowledge of marginalized communities on the internet. Download the full series.
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And to close the year on a high note, our co-director Anasuya Sengupta received the Internet & Society Award of the Oxford Internet Institute, “in recognition of her innovative use of the Internet as a platform to amplify marginalised voices in the virtual and physical world.” 👏🏽👏🏽
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2019: New languages and formats
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We launched this very own newsletter, a place to share our actions and echo the projects and initiatives of our communities. We also started our Whose Voices? podcast to bring new forms of oral knowledge that have been missing online.
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We held the Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages gathering, which convened a diverse group of thoughtful, powerful folks who recognise that language is a proxy for knowledge, and who want to reclaim our many languages beyond English on the internet. Download our report.
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Another climactic moment this year was when our co-founders Adele Godoy Vrana and Siko Bouterse embarked on a process of exploring their ancestries, beginning with retelling their own family stories in the context of race and colonization. They shared these stories at the 2019 CC Global Summit, and then online on a dedicated website.
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2020: Resistance and resilience
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As we collectively experienced the intersections of Covid-19 and global systemic racism, we decided to articulate our values of resistance and resilience in our anti-racist statement. Nothing was particularly new to those who know us - we have always been feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist. And, our decolonizing and knowledge justice frames have always been guided by our practices. And yet, we were called to articulate our values and practices courageously and unapologetically during this critical time.
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Amidst the pandemic, the third edition of #VisibleWikiWomen campaign celebrated women in the critical infrastructures of care. Our partners and communities came through once again and together, we achieved over 3000 images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Read more.
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2021: Celebration and gratitude
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As we celebrate what we’ve achieved so far, we thank all of you for being part of our journey during these five beautiful years. We have done a lot together and yet, there is a lot more to be done. We hope you will continue to walk this path with us as Whose Knowledge? partners, friends and co-conspirators for the years to come. Here’s to new adventures, shared dreams and practices for knowledge justice and a re-imagined internet! 🥂
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