Engaging the data moment

In this Data Ethnographies position paper we outline our agenda for approaching the relationship between ethics and data futures. The paper is based on our second data ethnographies workshop which brought together a group of colleagues whose work interfaces around ethnographic practice, design and ethnographic futures research, internet ethics and digital privacy, and personal data. Two key issues were at the centre of our discussions: first how ethnographic approaches to data can enable and might also call for new thinking about ethics and futures; and second how we confront the questions of the ethics and temporality of ethnographic research in data-worlds.

As datafication progressively invades all spheres of contemporary society, citizens grow increasingly aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. This awareness triggers new forms of civic engagement and political action that we term " data activism ". Data activism indicates the range of sociotechnical practices that interrogate the fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication. Combining Science and Technology Studies with Social Movement Studies, this theoretical article offers a foretaste of a research agenda on data activism. It foregrounds democratic agency vis-à-vis datafication, and unites under the same label ways of affirmative engagement with data (" proactive data activism " , e.g. data-based advocacy) and tactics of resistance to massive data collection (" reactive data activism " , e.g. encryption practices), understood as a continuum along which activists position and reposition themselves and their tactics. The article argues that data activism supports the emergence of novel epistemic cultures within the realm of civil society, making sense of data as a way of knowing the world and turning it into a point of intervention and generation of data countercultures. It offers the notion of data activism as a heuristic tool for the study of new forms of political participation and civil engagement in the age of datafication, and explores data activism as an evolving theoretical construct susceptible to contestation and revision.

Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research

Data power is a highly ambivalent phenomenon and it is precisely these ambivalences that open up important perspectives for the burgeoning field of critical data studies: First, the ambivalences between global infrastructures and local invisibilities. These challenge the grand narrative of the ephemeral nature of a global data infrastructure and instead make visible the local working and living conditions, and resources and arrangements required to operate and run them. Second is the ambivalences between the state and data justice. These consider data justice in relation to state surveillance and data capitalism and reflect the ambivalences between an “entrepreneurial state” and a “welfare state”. Third is the ambivalences of everyday practices and collective action, in which civil society groups, communities, and movements try to position the interests of people against the “big players” in the tech industry. With this introduction, we want to make the argument that seeing data pow...

The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as 'data science', 'data journalism', 'data brokerage', 'data mining', 'data storage', and 'data analysis' as part of the recon-figuration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accumulation of data. Data politics asks questions about the ways in which data has become such an object of power and explores how to critically intervene in its deployment as an object of knowledge. It is concerned with the conditions of possibility of data that involve things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables), language (code, programming, and algorithms), and people (scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, information technologists, designers) that together create new worlds. We define 'data pol-itics' as both the articulation of political questions about these worlds and the ways in which they provoke subjects to govern themselves and others by making rights claims. We contend that without understanding these conditions of possibility – of worlds, subjects and rights – it would be difficult to intervene in or shape data politics if by that it is meant the transformation of data subjects into data citizens.

First Monday

The fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication alters how people participate as citizens on a daily basis. “Big data” has come to constitute a new terrain of engagement, which brings organized collective action, communicative practices and data infrastructure into a fruitful dialogue. While scholarship is progressively acknowledging the emergence of bottom-up data practices, to date no research has explored the influence of these practices on the activists themselves. Leveraging the disciplines of critical data and social movement studies, this paper explores “proactive data activism”, using, producing and/or appropriating data for social change, and examines its biographical, political, tactical and epistemological consequences. Approaching engagement with data as practice, this study focuses on the social contexts in which data are produced, consumed and circulated, and analyzes how tactics, skills and emotions of individuals evolve in interplay with data. Through co...

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2019

Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences, and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics. Aimed at academics and postgraduate students interested in political aspects of data, this volume will also be of interest to experts in the fields of internet studies, international studies, Big Data, digital social sciences, and humanities. ISBN: 9781138053250 (hbk) ISBN: 9781138053267 (pbk) ISBN: 9781315167305 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

We live in a 'datafied' society where decisions taken by corporations and governments are increasingly data-and algorithm-driven. While data is often said to be 'collected' (as if pre-existing, and therefore, simply reflecting reality), the processes through which data are generated and communicated are not always transparent, nor benign. Data are political. Hence, we need a set of critical data literacy integrated in a critical approach to understand the socio-political and cultural mechanisms that affect individuals and groups in this datafied society. Given this scenario argues that data has a new sociality. In this scenario it is believed that a 'data revolution' (Taylor, 2017) has happened, but the revolution is not so much about the data and the technologies; rather it relates to long-standing social, political, economic and cultural issues (D'Ignazio andKlein, 2019). How can these issues be uncovered and at least acknowledged as pedagogical input for designing a more critical educational experience? This question has been the main driver of this project when designing and developing a versatil toolkit, available as an OER to enable teachers to negotiate the social aspects of data by critically analysing the hidden structures of data-intensive technologies to recognise and negotiate those structures. In short, aid teachers to explore the politics of data and strengthen, but also problematise, their data literacies. The toolkit can be used in different settings, e.g., as a standalone learning resource for informal/formal learners (e.g. self access/suggested readings, etc.), or made into a fundamental component in a taught credit-bearing module, i.e. 'wrapped' inside a module, either as the content for the entire module or as complementary units in the module. We based our pedagogical approach on principles of critical pedagogy hooks 1994;) that fosters teaching that incorporates problem posing and uses generative themes as a way into the different social dimensions of data to negotiate better our interactions with data-driven systems. Both of these strategies support the main aim of critical pedagogy i.e., to foster critical consciousness, that General Report • Page 4 is, to analyse and understand our social reality, a reality we care about, and plan a course of action that leads to social change with the (critical) hope to contribute to a more just society. The project took the shape of a transnational collaboration (OER Recommendation, 2019) with four partner institutions across Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016

In recent years, much has been written on ‘big data’ in both the popular and academic press. After the hubristic declaration of the ‘end of theory’ more nuanced arguments have emerged, suggesting that increasingly pervasive data collection and quantification may have significant implications for the social sciences, even if the social, scientific, political, and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared to the boosterish tone of much of its press, academic critiques of big data have been relatively muted, often focusing on the continued importance of more traditional forms of domain knowledge and expertise. Indeed, many academic responses to big data enthusiastically celebrate the availability of new data sources and the potential for new insights and perspectives they may enable. Undermining many of these critiques is a lack of attention to the role of technology in society, particularly with respect to the labor process, the continued ex...

2019

In politics, participation can be understood as citizen involvement in decision making, including mechanisms for people to intervene in political and social choices, among other areas of action. Those mechanisms are crucial since democracy hinges on civic participation in political life. However, in the big data era, participation is not possible without people’s access to and control of data; that is, civil rights become digital rights. This article deals with data literacy as a filter for participation in a datafied environment and the role of ordinary people in data processes. Because participation in a datafied world depends of people’s ability to enter the fray, questions about where lines can be drawn to separate experts from non-experts (i.e. ordinary citizens) and whether intervention in the data infrastructure requires a degree of data literacy for effective participation constitute a relevant discussion for the practice and theory of activism as a form of political or civi...

AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2021

This panel deploys a range of qualitative methodologies to investigate how processes of datafication meet with the subjective experiences of ordinary people, and the practices of everyday life. We draw on the model of ‘everyday data cultures’ proposed by Burgess (2017) to explore the ways diverse data practices – including the production and circulation of data visualisations, modes of data storage and vernacular engagements with data literacy – can be understood as aspects of culture. Following Burgess, we define everyday data cultures as the practices that form around and in response to the social media and other data (and data trails) that people generate as we go about our daily lives. These practices form from our diverse engagements with, experiences of, and approaches to understanding and negotiating these data Across these four papers, we address the everyday politics of social media platforms; the development of vernacular pedagogies of AI and machine leaning practices; the...

Big Data and Society, 2023

The article proposes the theoretical category of data arenas as a relational field for strategic actors in diverse areas of the contentious politics of data (Beraldo and Milan, 2019). The paper argues that the conceptualization of data activism needs to be related to the immediate data arena in which the action takes place, in order to select the interactive opportunities and threats for emerging data-driven repertoires of action. To fully work through the relational dynamics of data activism, it is necessary to move from a conceptualization of data infrastructure to the notion of data arenas as an 'open-ended bundle of rules and resources that allows certain kinds of interaction to proceed' (Jasper, 2006: 141). Using the case of environmental data activism, I highlight four key dimensions to study: (a) strategic use of data as capital that differentiates and positions actors, as well as influences their further choices; (b) practices of defining the boundaries of the problem on which the arena focuses and outlining the pool of actors who participate in the process of solving it; (3) sets of relationships among the outlined pool of actors which represent opportunities and threats for the actors, related to the position they occupy within an arena; and (4) power as the ability to control and shape an arena. Data arena approach shed new light on data activism as a relational practice, combining the latest developments in research on data contexts and the political situatedness of data with the emerging field of research on data activism.

Data Power in Action. Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis, 2023

Data is everywhere, increasingly mediating and shaping all domains of life. It is urgent in this context, argues the introduction, to investigate the political nature of data. However, much of the investigation of data politics focus on what concerns researchers in the global north – big data, data infrastructures, cyber security, surveillance and so on, and is rarely explicit about the diverse and fragmented nature of data particularly in the global south. Therefore, while considering in its first section issues that are planetary in reach, such as data and platform capitalism, data ethics and data justice, contributions in the book focus essentially on situations outside Europe and North America – in Kenya, China, India, South Africa. Beyond such a provincialization of data politics, the book has three aims: to analyse data politics specifically in the urban realm, to propose a practice-oriented approach while structural accounts are predominant in urban data studies, and to look at crises as moments of acceleration, visibility and legitimation of new forms of data power. The introduction then discusses the concepts that are central to the book – urban data politics, data power in action crises –, explains the structure of the book and highlights the main arguments of its chapters.

New Media & Society, 2019

Data activism has emerged as a response to asymmetries in how data and the means of knowledge production are distributed. This article examines MyData, a data activism initiative developing principles for a new technical and commercial ecosystem in which individuals control the use of personal data. Analyzing material collected at a formative event shaping MyData activism, we examine how more just data arrangements are framed to enhance equal participation. Our analysis shows agreement on what is ultimately at stake: individual data agency and fair competition in the data economy. However, two alternatives are offered for what participation involves. Collaboration with commercial actors favors framing participation as agency in data markets, thereby potentially limiting the scope of what is at stake. The alternative framing presents a rights-based understanding of economic and civic agency, potentially leading to a broader understanding of participation in a datafied society.

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices.