About Me

Zara Rahman is a British-Bangladeshi author and researcher whose interests lie at the intersection of power, technology and justice. Her book, Machine Readable Me: The Hidden Ways Tech Shapes Our Identities was published in October 2023 by 404 Ink, and builds upon over a decade of research on how data about who we are is used to shape the paths available to us in life. She has held fellowships at Stanford University and the Harvard Kennedy School, and is currently a Visiting Research Collaborator at Cornell University. She serves on the board at Saheli, a UK-based non-profit providing support and refuge to women of colour fleeing domestic abuse, and on the Board of A People’s Guide to Tech, an organisation helping people navigate their past and future with technology. Her writing has appeared in the Daily Dot, Himal Southasian and the New Humanitarian, among others, and she is a frequent public speaker, moderator and host, and media commentator.

Previously, she was part of the Executive Leadership team at The Engine Room, an international non-profit organisation strengthening the fight for social justice by supporting civil society to use technology and data in strategic, effective and responsible ways. Since 2022 she has worked as a freelance research and strategy consultant to philanthropic foundations and civil society on technology, movement building and social justice. She is currently exploring what it looks like to move from a place of solidarity with other social justice movements when it comes to technology and data, and writes a semi-regular newsletter, called Distillations/Constellations.

The long version

Over the past twelve years, my work has interrogated how power moves through technical systems, the unintended impacts thereof, and explored how the use of digital data impacts human rights and society through a feminist lens. Previously, I worked at The Engine Room, an international non-profit organisation strengthening the fight for social justice by supporting civil society to use technology and data in strategic, effective and responsible ways. I started there as a research consultant in 2015 when the organisation was just 7 people, and ended my tenure as the interim Executive Director with a team of 20 based across 13 countries. There, I built up our research team, designed and oversaw all of our programmatic work as Deputy Director for 3 years, and honed my people and team management skills.

I’ve held fellowships with the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University’s Centre on Philanthropy and Civil Society; digitalHKS at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Data & Society Research Institute. I currently serve on the Board of Saheli, a UK-based non-profit providing support and refuge to women of colour fleeing domestic abuse, and on the Advisory Board of A People’s Guide to Tech, a non-profit working to develop critical thinking and a greater sense of agency towards technology. I’m excited to be part of the inaugural grantmaking circle of the Numun Fund, the first fund supporting feminist technology infrastructures in the larger world.

I’ve written on a wide range of topics, including the ethics of Open Source Investigations for human rights work; the impact of predictive analytics on children’s rights; race politics of emoji skin tones; digital identification systems; ; biometrics in the humanitarian sector; and the digital persecution of the Rohingya, among other issues. Beyond research papers, I’ve also strived to make my research findings accessible in fun and interesting ways, for example with this zine, Inform/Transform, produced in 2017 in collaboration with Mimi Ọnụọha; and this zine, on the political consequences of the rise of DNA databases.

In the past, I worked for School of Data, building data literacy among civil society and journalists in over 20 countries; for OpenOil, advocating for more publicly-available data about the extractive industries in order to push for more equitable distribution of natural resources; for the Open Knowledge Foundation, working with communities around the world pushing for open data availability and use, and for Access Info Europe, campaigning for an access to information law in Spain. I’ve written for the Correspondent, Himal Southasian and the New Humanitarian, among others, and I’m a regular contributor to Global Voices, where I write about digital policy in Bangladesh.

I’ve been invited to speak at a wide range of events, from hacker camps to tech conferences, activist camps and humanitarian congresses, among others. I’ve given keynotes and presentations, taken part in panels and moderated conversations, mostly in English but sometimes in German, and very occasionally, in Spanish and French too. I’ve also been invited to give guest lectures at a variety of universities, and really enjoy speaking to students from a wide range of disciplines about my work.

In the past, I’ve sat on the jury of the Prototype Fund, on the Program Committee for re:publica, and have been on the Steering Committee of REAL ML, among other community-focused contributions. I’m an avid reader (you can see what I’m reading here), and I also enjoy hosting and moderating conversations, particularly with authors.

contact

Email me on mail[at]zararah.net