OU PhD student launches a website to gather experiences of misogynoir online

An OU PhD student has launched the first-ever research platform to capture the particular intersection of misogyny and racial oppression experienced by Black women online: “Misogynoir”.

Joseph Kwarteng, a second-year PhD student in the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute, has launched Misogynoir Online, a website that invites Black women to share their stories of misogynoir by posting them on the platform.

The site, which is planned to run from early March to June 2022, is designed to capture the anonymised experiences of Black women who have experienced misogynoir.  Joseph, whose background is in computer science, plans to use his data to create novel Artificial Intelligence detection tools to detect misogynoir online.

He said:

“There are several automatic detection approaches for detecting hate speech, sexism, racism, as well as offensive and abusive language. To the best of my knowledge, there are presently no computational tools or resources that allow the automated detection of this form of hatred. My goal is to contribute to that by exploring experiences of misogynoir, understanding how it manifests online and identifying ways to mitigate it.”