Imagining Feminist Technology Through Trajectories Rooted in Care and Inclusive Futures

Growing up analog and coming of age online shaped my feminist and technological sensibilities long before I had language for them. In school, feminism and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) were treated as separate universes even as our lived experiences made their entanglements impossible to ignore. Catfishing, doxxing, and non‑consensual image circulation made clear that digital life reproduced the same gendered and racialised harms we encountered offline. In 2013, when I began teaching Science and Feminism at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, the STEMinist Club emerged as a space where students could theorise and build feminist futures together.

What first appeared as a convergence of student concerns proved part of a broader shift. The questions my students asked – about harm, vulnerability, accountability, and design – were animating feminist tech movements around the world. Our campus conversations were one node in a lineage that treats technology, safety, and power as intertwined, responding to systemic digital harm through care‑centred, community-rooted approaches.

In a landscape marked by surveillance, harassment, and algorithmic bias, feminist tech movements reframe safety as a collective responsibility rather than an individual burden. Organising locally, horizontally, and cooperatively, feminist technologists embed safety in relationships of trust rather than relying solely on technical checklists. This turn towards care and mutual aid draws from a tradition in which protection is relational, situated, and shared – a shift from reactive fixes to proactive, community‑rooted practice that resists isolation and cultivates resilience.

I describe coding care as the technical, organisational, relational, and ecological practices through which technologists build and govern technologies grounded in interdependence, justice, sustainability, and community well‑being. So it is not wrong to say that feminist technologists are not merely responding to harm, instead they are redefining what technology is and does through the practices that constitute coding care.

Across four interconnected visions and voices, I argue that care functions as the operating system beneath this work, where learning, making, and experimenting are inseparable from safety, recognition, and collective presence; where care is not an accessory to technological practice but its foundation. Through the movement infrastructures of May First Movement Technology (U.S./Mexico), the epistemic and artistic praxis of Stefanie Wuschitz (Austria/Germany), the cooperative Southern ecologies of Sutty (Argentina), and the design‑justice pedagogy of Anusha Sankholkar (U.S./India), I trace how coding care becomes not only a method, but an inheritance and a horizon.

I describe coding care as the technical, organisational, relational, and ecological practices through which technologists build and govern technologies grounded in interdependence, justice, sustainability, and community well‑being.

May First models care as movement infrastructure; Wuschitz articulates its epistemic architecture; Sutty grounds it in community‑run cooperative ecologies; and Sankholkar carries it forward into pedagogy and future‑oriented leadership. Together, they show that care is the political, ecological, and pedagogical method through which feminist technologists build survivable, sustainable, and interconnected digital worlds.

Coding Care

Coding care enables a collaborative, ecological reimagining of technology through centering people, land, and relationships, and beginning from the tempo of community rather than the speed of capital. Writing code this way does not extract; it accompanies. It becomes a political, material, attentive practice grounded in relation and intention rather than in output. These practices are most vibrant at the margins, among groups historically excluded from funding, denied visibility, or constrained by infrastructural power. In these margins, coding care is both personal and legible: a survival strategy, a design methodology, and a refusal to cede technological imagination to corporate or colonial actors. The margins are not sites of lack; they are world‑making and knowledge‑producing.

In these feminist technological worlds, care is more than a corrective to harm; it is the atmosphere that makes alternative digital futures imagineable, breathable and accessible. It holds learning and safety together, linking experimentation with recognition and collective presence. Care is neither sentimental nor merely procedural; it is the substrate that makes technical practice possible, the condition that enables durable infrastructures and durable belonging.

From Theory to Praxis: How Feminist Technologists Build Worlds

May First models what care looks like in practice. As a hemispheric, member‑powered organisation, it grounds technical decisions in linguistic justice, collective governance, and political context analysis. In speaking with Membership Coordinator Jes Ciacci, I was struck by her insistence on distinguishing personal beliefs from the organisation’s collective positions, underscoring May First’s commitment to transparency, accountability, and democratic process.

Founded in 2005, May First supports members with web hosting, email, and secure servers built on free and open‑source software and participates in international collaborations focused on digital rights, autonomy, and movement security. Their mission is to “advance the strategic use and collective control of technology for local struggles, global transformation, and emancipation without borders.” Infrastructure, for them, is political, i.e. not only about servers and uptime, but about who sets the terms and whose needs define the defaults.

In these feminist technological worlds, care is more than a corrective to harm; it is the atmosphere that makes alternative digital futures imagineable, breathable and accessible.

Ciacci offered a metaphor for joining May First: migrating is like moving out of a house – there’s junk, boxes, and logistics. The comparison captures the orientation required to enter an organisation built by others, where histories and systems already shape the space. Integrating means navigating existing architectures with care and recognising emotional labour as central. It becomes relational maintenance within a living ecosystem, discerning what is yours to carry, what predates you, and how to contribute without overwhelming yourself or the space.

Where Ciacci shows how these principles operate through member‑funded budgets, linguistic justice, collective decision‑making, risk analysis, and deliberate exits from Big Tech, Stefanie Wuschitz offers an epistemic architecture that explains why feminist technologists build worlds this way. Her scholarship and feminist hacker practice frame care as the operating system of feminist tech through permacomputing (“a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology”), degrowth, layered communication, and collective creativity.

The Politics of Digital Care: Feminist Coding

Speaking as a feminist coder, artist, and community technologist, Stefanie Wuschitz reframes technology not as a neutral tool but as an ecological, relational field shaped by extraction, care, and the entanglement of human and non‑human worlds. A feminist approach, she argues, begins by undoing the “black box” – taking apart tools, tracing their origins, and following their material and political afterlives, “from cradle to cradle.”

She invites us to see feminist tech cultures as spaces where maintenance, repair, ecological accountability, and collective world‑building outweigh speed, optimisation, and the mythology of innovation. This is not only a method but a worldview, grounded in generosity, plurality, and the ethics of staying with the trouble of learning. “Learning happens in the periphery, where people are already comfortable,” she notes. Coding care, in her hands, is an epistemic shift as much as a design choice.

Her work demythologises technology by dismantling intellectual constraints like gender binaries, mind/body splits, and human/nonhuman divides that limit innovation and political imagination. She insists we talk directly about bias and dualism rather than treating them as edge cases. The practices that sustain learning echo this politics of care: checking in when something goes off the radar, treating mistakes as openings, and ensuring that asking a question feels like solving a riddle together. “Safety, recognition, and tolerance are prerequisites for the brain to learn something new.” These conditions shape who stays in tech and who is pushed out.

Against a dominant paradigm of acceleration, output, disposability, and overwork, alternatives like Sutty emerge - projects that refuse speed and instead model feminist, sustainable, community‑rooted infrastructure.

Beyond Extraction

Working from Buenos Aires, Sutty brings coding care into a Southern, transfeminist cooperative practice, embedding care in sociocratic governance, lightweight ecological design, and participatory development that resists extractive platform logics. They build systems that sustain movements rather than extract from them, demonstrating that alternatives matter because they reveal what becomes possible when communities build the internet they need. If Stefanie offers the epistemic architecture of feminist technological care and May First shows its organisational dimensions, Sutty makes visible what that care looks like in daily infrastructural work.

The practices that sustain learning echo this politics of care: checking in when something goes off the radar, treating mistakes as openings, and ensuring that asking a question feels like solving a riddle together.

Emerging from Latin American histories of digital self‑defense, free software activism, and community radio traditions, Sutty began as an informal cooperative in 2018 and was legally recognised in Argentina in 2021. They describe themselves as a Latin American, inclusive collective building technology for human rights, LGBTQIA+ communities, environmental defenders, and movements fighting for digital autonomy. Their work reframes infrastructure as a relationship: not a product but a practice; not a service but a shared commitment to ecological sustainability, interdependence, and freedom from platform capture. “Hosting shouldn’t be a luxury or a trap; it should be a collective right,” they emphasise. For them, Sutty is less a company than a community‑driven experiment in autonomy. “We’re building tools so movements can breathe, organize, and stay safe online.”

Where Big Tech accelerates, Sutty slows the tempo; where platforms extract, Sutty redistributes; where tech culture isolates, Sutty insists on collective survival. Their model clarifies why feminist technologists increasingly turn toward building alternatives through care‑centered infrastructures rooted in autonomy and long‑term sustainability. If Sutty shows what feminist technological care looks like in practice, my student Anusha Sankholkar shows how it gets taught, scaled, and future‑proofed.

Infrastructure as Future

Shaped by feminist coding traditions such as Girls Who Code and informed by her experiences in both India and the United States, Anusha Sankholkar began early, launching a digital‑safety nonprofit in high school. She represents the pedagogical and forward‑facing horizon of feminist tech. Her practice spans classrooms, community labs, and professional spaces, designing Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)‑compliant websites for my department, Technology, Culture, and Society, and deploying code during a pharmaceutical internship. Her work is lived praxis that is design‑justice orientated, and is already reshaping how digital care is taught, practiced, and imagined.

In her classrooms and community labs, this philosophy appears in small, radical gestures in debugging circles where failure is collectivised; code reviews that begin not with error‑spotting but with asking students what they were trying to make; installation rituals that treat onboarding as belonging rather than gatekeeping. Sankholkar calls these “micro‑protocols of inclusion,” but their implications are architectural. They foster a counter‑normativity in which marginalised youth learn to trust intuition as much as logic, to see abstraction not as an obstacle but as a language they already speak. Her pedagogy refuses the scarcity mindset that tells underrepresented technologists to be grateful for any seat at the table. Instead, she invites them to imagine and build tables calibrated to their needs, where friction is minimised not for efficiency but for dignity. In doing so, she transforms care from sentiment into a replicable pattern, a design grammar for the next generation of technologists who understand that infrastructure begins with how we treat each other.

This generational vantage is what makes Sankholkar distinctly generative. Where Stefanie theorises care, May First renders it in everyday life, and Sutty builds infrastructures that slow extraction and redistribute power, Sankholkar focuses on engineering culture itself: the assumptions, data practices, and review rituals that determine whose futures technology will serve. “Developers are curators of public space,” she argues, pushing accessibility beyond compliance toward reparative justice. She calls for Equity‑Focused Data Provenance as a refusal of what she names “technological redlining baked into datasets,” and her advocacy for reflexive peer review challenges meritocracy’s myths. 

Unlike Big Tech’s acceleration or even Sutty’s deliberate deceleration, Anusha Sankholkar’s contribution is temporal and intergenerational as she builds new defaults through semantic rather than aesthetic code, bravery over perfection, collective accountability over individual exceptionalism. “If we don’t change how people learn to code, we’ll keep reproducing the same systems we claim to be disrupting.” In her frame, the future of feminist tech is not only the tools we build, but the builders we cultivate.

Taken together, these four trajectories map a genealogy of feminist tech that is not linear or uniform but braided: theory, practice, infrastructure, and pedagogy moving in concert. Stefanie names the epistemic stakes; May First translates them into mutualist routines; Sutty materialises them in servers that hold communities rather than extract from them; and Anusha ensures those futures are durable by transforming the culture that will maintain and inherit them. What emerges is not a manifesto but a methodology based on care as protocol, justice as design principle, relation as system requirement. Their work underscores that feminist technology is not a corrective appended to existing architectures but a reorientation of how we imagine, build, and sustain technological worlds. In their hands, the future is not automated, instead it is assembled, maintained, and coded into being with care.