Gender & Tech Online Talk Series: Technocapitalism & Environmental Justice

The Gender and Tech Talk Series brings together leading scholars, advocates, and practitioners to discuss the intersections of gender, technology, democracy and human rights. It critically examines how digital platforms and technologies impact women, queer and gender-diverse individuals while exploring pathways for more inclusive, rights-focused digital governance frameworks.

The fourth talk, “Technocapitalism and Environmental Justice,” will examine the intersection of technocapitalism, environmental justice, and gender, exploring how the global dominance of tech corporations exacerbates environmental inequalities and impacts marginalized communities. We expect to discuss the environmental and social costs of digital technologies, focusing on how technocapitalism contributes to resource extraction, waste, and exploitation, particularly in the Global South. The conversation also aims at addressing the gendered dimensions of tech-environmental harm, highlighting how marginalized communities bear the brunt of these impacts.

This online series, co-organized by Yasmin Curzi and Jess Reia, runs monthly featuring two speakers and international perspectives. It began in April 2025 and will end in December 2025, with the following dates and topics:

4/25 | Digital Colonialism
5/27 | Data Governance
8/28 | Platform Governance
9/29 | Technocapitalism and environmental justice
10/27 | Data Work and Political Participation
11/24 | Trans-inclusive AI Governance

The discussions will become a report published in early spring 2026.

About the panelists

Tamara Kneese directs Data & Society Research Institute’s Climate, Justice, and Technology program and previously led the Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab (AIMLab). Before joining D&S, she was lead researcher at Green Software Foundation, director of developer engagement on the Green Software team at Intel, and assistant professor of Media Studies and director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2023) and co-author of Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry (Common Notions Press, 2025). Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text, Social Media + Society, and the International Journal of Communication and in popular outlets such as Wired, The Verge, and The Baffler. Tamara holds a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU.

Paz Peña is a Mozilla Senior Fellow for 2025, dedicated to studying the socio-environmental impacts of AI data centers in Latin America. With over 15 years of experience, she explores the intersection of technology, social justice, and feminism, working with governments, civil society, and international agencies. For the past seven years, Paz has focused her research on the socio-environmental consequences of digital technologies in Latin America. In 2021, she established the Latin American Institute of Terraforming (terraforminglatam.net), a unique space for reflecting on the relationship between technology and the ecological and climate crises we face. In 2023, she published a summary of her research in the book “Tecnologías para un planeta en llamas” (Paidós). Paz is based in Santiago, Chile.

Jess Reia (moderator) is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and a Faculty co-lead at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. In 2025, Reia was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. They are also a Visiting Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. Reia works primarily on topics of technology policy and human rights transnationally, being interested in the untold stories in our datasets, citizen-generated data and how artificial intelligence is transforming the way we think about evidence and representation.

A policymaker by training, Reia’s research and advocacy agenda has focused on building collaborations with government and civil society organizations in Brazil, Canada and the US for over a decade, resulting in numerous resources to support policy- and decision-making and academic publications in four languages. Reia is also a public scholar whose writing and interviews were featured in various outlets, including Estadão, Le Devoir and BBC. Before joining UVA, they were appointed Mellon Postdoctoral Researcher at McGill University, studying the impact of smart-washing and datafication in nocturnal urban spaces and their communities. Reia held a two-year mandate as a member of MTL 24/24’s first Night Council in Montreal. Prior to that, they worked at the Center for Technology & Society at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro.

Reia’s latest book, “Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities” (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2025), explores what happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands. A transnational exploration of often unseen aspects of urban governance, it examines the intricate limits of legality, data visibility, and resistance from the perspective of those working at the social and regulatory margins of society.

Currently, Reia teaches courses for future data scientists on ethics, governance, and policy. Past courses have included a focus on urban data, digital rights, intellectual property, and research methods.