genevieve clifford explores what digital poverty means for transgender people in Wales by characterising the utility of digital technologies, as well as the political economies that surround them and the transgender people that use them. Her work is phenomenological, and centres the stories and experiences of trans people, and practitioners supporting their use of technology. Her research interests lie unexpectedly in social construction (and critique) of technology, transgender studies (particularly sociological and philosophical aspects), and Luddism in the modern age. genevieve’s PhD is funded by the Welsh Graduate School for the Social Sciences.
The Welsh Government has moved from a solely capabilities-based approach to measuring digital inequality to one that incorporates political, social, and economic factors through the adoption of the Welsh Minimum Digital Living Standard. Though this welcome and mirrors wider work in digital inequalities research (where it is often termed digital poverty), it is the Welsh Government’s selection of households with children as unit of analysis that is of concern, as it risks excluding those who do not fit within cisheteropatriarchal familial structures.
Here I wish to focus on transgender individuals as those likely to be excluded from this research, especially given the prevalence of non-familial social reproduction amongst such subalternised individuals (e.g., in mutual aid or kinship organisations) and the importance digital technologies play in realising transition and the construction of counterpower. This latter point is especially important, a lack of material access to digital technology can mean the lack of self-realisation in times of compulsory computing.
In this talk I present a review of relevant literature and frameworks, and then discuss early phenomenological analyses from empirical interview work with transgender people (n = 15), and thematic analyses of transcripts from focus groups with organisations that counter digital inequalities and / or support transgender materiality (n = TBD).