Reimagining Data Work: Participatory Annotation Workshops as Feminist Practice

AI systems depend on the invisible and undervalued labor of data workers, who are often treated as interchangeable units of labor rather than as collaborators with meaningful expertise. Critical scholars and practitioners have proposed alternative principles for data work, but few empirical studies examine how to enact them in practice. This paper bridges this gap through a case study of multilingual, iterative, and participatory data annotation processes with journalists and activists focused on news narratives of gender-related violence. We offer two methodological contributions. First, we demonstrate how workshops rooted in feminist epistemology can foster dialogue, build community, and disrupt knowledge hierarchies in data annotation. Second, drawing insights from practice, we deepen analysis of existing feminist and participatory principles. We show, for example, that prioritizing context and pluralism in practice may require “bounding” context and working towards what we describe as a “tactical consensus.” We also explore tensions around materially acknowledging labor while resisting transactional researcher-participant dynamics. Through this work, we contribute to growing efforts to reimagine data and AI development as relational and political spaces for understanding difference, enacting care, and building solidarity across shared struggles.