Keynote by Nimra Ahmed on What Remains After the Research? CaseCompass, Activism, and the Politics of Design, 4 June 2026
We are pleased to invite you to join this guest lecture, which is part of Cycles of Care, a spring workshop series at the UZH Digital Society Initiative’s Health Community: Cycles of Care.
“What Remains After the Research? CaseCompass, Activism, and the Politics of Design”
📅 Thursday, June 4 2026 – 18.15 – 19.00h
📍 University of Zurich, Digital Society Initiative, Building SOC, Rämistrasse 69 or 💻 Hybrid/Zoom
About the Lecture
In this talk, Nimra Ahmed will reflect on CaseCompass, a community-led socio-technical system designed with the Swiss Competence Centre against Forced Marriages to support case work in the context of forced marriage and gender-based violence. Starting from this project, the talk asks what it means for feminist and activist research to leave something behind that is useful, sustainable, and accountable to the communities it engages with. The talk will explore how feminist HCI, design justice, and community-led design can support more accountable forms of research: research that does not merely extract stories, publish findings, or produce short-lived prototypes, but works toward community-defined needs, sustainable infrastructures, and lasting forms of impact. Through the example of CaseCompass, Nimra will reflect on academic accompliceship, participation, trust, handover, and the ongoing responsibility researchers have toward the communities and organizations they work with.
About Nimra Ahmed, MSc, Fast-track PhD Student, University of Zurich
Nimra is a fast-track PhD student at the University of Zurich’s People and Computing Lab, supervised by Prof. Dr. Elaine May Huang. Her research focuses on feminist design, social justice, and community-led digital interventions for marginalized communities, particularly those affected by forced marriage, domestic and intimate partner violence.
She earned her BSc in Informatics at UZH, where her thesis Designing Technology for People Affected by Forced Marriage received the UZH Impact Award in 2022. You might have seen her work featured in OEC magazine – if you missed it, you can read more about it here and here. In 2023, she received DIZH funding for her project Supporting People Affected by Forced Marriage through Digital Transformation and joined the DSI PhD Excellence Program.
In summer 2025, she and some other amazing women founded WINZ (Women in Informatics Network Zurich), where Nimra serves as President. WINZ aims to create safe, empowering spaces and organize community and career events for women, FLINTA+, and allies at the department.
Her work sits at the intersection of feminist HCI, design justice, and community-led research. She studies how technology shapes experiences of gender-based violence and what it means to design with, not for, those affected. Using trauma-informed and participatory approaches, she:
- Examines how technologies support or constrain help-seeking, recognition, and life repair after violence.
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Designs and sustains digital infrastructures that strengthen existing care ecosystems.
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Works alongside community organizations to develop accountable, non-extractive, and long-term collaborations.
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Explores how culture, power, and inequality shape research, technological design and use.
She aims to move HCI beyond crisis-focused interventions toward justice-oriented, relational, and sustainable sociotechnical design.
About the Workshop Series
Digital women’s health sits at the intersection of medicine, technology, sociology, and intersectionally feminist design. Yet, despite growing evidence of sex- and gender-specific differences, their integration into research design, data analysis, and applied practice remains fragmented, inconsistent, and methodologically underdeveloped.
This workshop series therefore brings together researchers and practitioners across medicine, technology, sociology, and feminist design who work with sex- and gender-specific data focusing on
- how to better (best) integrate such data into research and practice
- sharing evidence and best-case practices and
- identify and closing gaps and biases in data, design, communication, and care
Each workshop session will combine keynote inputs, interactive group work, and open discussion.
Contributions and materials from the sessions will feed into a living document compiling best practices, tools, and resources (e.g., validated questionnaires, datasets, GitHub repositories, R packages, and design principles). The goal is to translate these insights into a joint scholarly publication advancing the field of digital women’s health together with all interested workshop participants.