Data: a cosmopolitical approach

Antennae, 2024

Today aspects of social life are governed by numbers. This phenomenon has been described in the sociological literature as “datafication”; that is governance (or the illusion thereof) through data. One may describe this phenomenon as the “tyranny of metrics.” The optimization of governance processes through quantification is a pervasive characteristic of contemporary neoliberalism, yet neoliberal theorists such as F. A. Hayek warned against precisely such trends. Social systems are too complex and indeterministic for any quantifiable social “laws” to even exist. Neoliberal governance in practice seems to have forgotten the initial skepticism of neoliberal theorists regarding quantification. Supposed scientific objectivity subordinates phenomena to an all-encompassing quantification. By enmeshing the thinking of authors of various persuasions, a systemic and powerful critique of technocracy can be elaborated.

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.

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.

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.

STS Encounters, 2020

All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how to engage data otherwise. This otherwise indexes the rich variety of approaches to data beyond what we are currently witnessing. Whether through the development of politically and ethically relevant forms of data experiments, or the construction of alternative visions of the much-critiqued data infrastructures of powerful platform providers, all the articles reflect upon how we––as scholars and citizens––can live and work with data in ways amenable to diverse, critical, and ethical forms of social existence. This introduction intervenes in this debate in its own particular way, principally by considering what it means to characterise the contemporary as a data moment. The term data moment, we argue, works as a conceptual device calling for more ethical-political engagement with data practices. At the same time, it also retains a temporal inflection. Moments, we claim, are not sequential steps in a linear process, but are themselves productive of, and products of, temporal orders. Moments are also saturated in affect, we argue, and it is such affects that contribute to how particular forms of meaning emerge with/as data. By embracing the compelling empirical, theoretical and ethical challenges of this data moment our ambition with this special issue is to make a modest contribution to how scholars can engage data in the present, while also shaping a future where data are treated critically, ethically, and reflexively.

Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Full Papers - Volume 1, 2018

In this paper, we think with Puig de la Bellacasa's 'matters of care' about how to support data care and its politics. We use the notion to reflect on participatory design activities in two recent case studies of local collective data management in ecological research. We ask "How to design for data care?" and "How to account for the politics of data care in design?" Articulation of data care together with ethically and politically significant data issues in design, reveals in these cases the invisible labors of care by local data advocates and a 'partnering designer'. With digital data work in the sciences increasing and data infrastructures for research under development at a variety of large scales, the local level is often considered merely a recipient of services rather than an active participant in design of data practices and infrastructures. We identify local collective data management as a 'neglected thing' in infrastructure planning and speculate on how things could be different in the data landscape. 1

There is a crisis in which the risks of the culture of data cannot be effectively mitigated. This paper will describe how this will prevail until there is a better understanding of data practices and impact. This paper will then propose how the delegate and trustee models of representative democracy can provide a framework for understanding what decisions are being made about data, and what best practice could look like. This paper will then explore the problems with this framework. The conclusion reveals questions that will be asked of an ongoing ethnographic study.

Pink, S., M. Ruckenstein, R. Willim, & M. Duque ‘Broken Data’ (2018) Big Data and Society. 5(1) https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717753228

In this article we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of ​ broken data​. In doing so we advance critical discussions of digital data ​ by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from mundane everyday activity: the incompleteness, inaccuracy and dispersed nature of personal self-tracking data; the data cleaning and repair processes of big data analysis; and how data can turn into noise and vice versa when they are transduced into sound within practices of music production and sound art. This, we argue is a necessary step for considering the meaning and implications of data as it is increasingly mobilised in ways that impact society and our everyday 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.

2019

Data is currently proliferating, multiplying and seeping into seemingly every corner of society. Great ambitions are often associated with the capacity of data and data infrastructures to 'drive' organizational change, revolutionize governmental institutions, optimize private companies and ease everyday life. Unwilling to accept that practices, organizations and identities are simply being 'technically upgraded', anthropologists and scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have emphasized how datafication involves heterogenous ontological experiments and world-building efforts. In the wake of these developments, it has also become clear that the effects of datafication reach far beyond original intentions. Heightened surveillance, discriminatory sorting practices and targeted forms of data collection, often perpetuating deep-seated racial stereotypes, are but some of the issues currently brought to the foreground by data practices. Indeed, far from offering solutions to common matters of concern, all too often datafication produces disappointment and disconcertment. Living with data can seem unbearable, especially for those whose life is continuously produced as targets of discrimination. What openings might there be out of this situation? This PhD course seeks to offer a space for critically engaging with, against and in the midst of contemporary data worlds. The course will focus specifically on what it means to think through issues of social justice in relation to specific data situations and practices. Beyond inherited ideals of universal rights and equality, what are the specific and situated challenges posed by emerging data worlds? How do data influence the distribution of life chances, resources and opportunities? How is data implicated in making certain lives worth living, while others are excluded or made invisible? How and to what extend do certain data sets and their modes of ordering become authoritative regimes of enunciation and what worlds are silenced by this? By working through such issues, the course introduces students to ongoing conversations in anthropology, critical data studies and STS. It offers a series of concepts and methods that can help build socially just and analytically robust engagements with emerging data worlds, explicitly searching for experimental openings in our ways of relating to all things digital.

STS Encounters

All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how to engage data otherwise. This otherwise indexes the rich variety of approaches to data beyond what we are currently witnessing. Whether through the development of politically and ethically relevant forms of data experiments, or the construction of alternative visions of the much-critiqued data infrastructures of powerful platform providers, all the articles reflect upon how we - as scholars and citizens - can live and work with data in ways amenable to diverse, critical, and ethical forms of social existence. This introduction intervenes in this debate in its own particular way, principally by considering what it means to characterise the contemporary as a data moment. The term data moment, we argue, works as a conceptual device calling for more ethical-political engagement with data practices. At the same time, it also retains a temporal inflection. Moments, we claim, are not sequential steps in a linear process,...

This special issue offers a critical dialogue around the myriad political dimen-sions of Big Data. We begin by recognising that the technological objects of Big Data are unprecedented in the speed, scope and scale of their computation and knowledge production. This critical dialogue is grounded in an equal recogni-tion of continuities around Big Data’s social, cultural, and political economic dimensions. Big Data, then, is political in the same way in which identity, the body, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity are political, that is, as sites of struggle over meaning, interpretations, and categorisations of lived experience. Big Data is political in the way circuits of production, distribution, and consumption are political; that is, as sites where access, control and agency are unequally distrib-uted through asymmetrical power relations, including relations of data produc-tion. Big Data is political in the way contemporary politics are being reshaped by data analysis in electoral campaign strategy, and through state surveillance as strikingly evidenced by the Snowden revelations on the NSA and GCHQ. Big Data is also political in the contestation of this advanced scientific practice, wherein the generation of data at unprecedented scale promises a precise and objective measure of everyday life. However, the computational dreams of an N = all verisimilitude – that is, of datasets providing a one-to-one correspon-dence to a given phenomenon – are haunted by the normative biases embedded in all data. This is not to suggest that Big Data – more specifically processes of datafication1 – are best or at all understood as socially constructed. Indeed, discursive analysis or unreconstructed social theory cannot fully grasp how data re-articulates the social, cultural, political and economic in a deeply recursive manner. Thus, any political reckoning must equally account for the materiality of data, alongside the logic guiding its processes and the practices that deploy its tools. In short, what are the power relations animating the knowledge generated by data analytics?

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

Digital Culture & Society, 2016

The growth of big data and the development of digital data infrastructures raises numerous questions about the nature of data, how they are being produced, organized, analyzed and employed, and how best to make sense of them and the work they do. Critical data studies endeavours to answer such questions. This paper sets out a vision for critical data studies, building on the initial provocations of . It is divided into three sections. The first details the recent step change in the production and employment of data and how data and databases are being reconceptualised. The second forwards the notion of a data assemblage that encompasses all of the technological, political, social and economic apparatuses and elements that constitutes and frames the generation, circulation and deployment of data. Drawing on the ideas of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking it is posited that one way to enact critical data studies is to chart and unpack data assemblages. The third starts to unpack some the ways that data assemblages do work in the world with respect to dataveillance and the erosion of privacy, profiling and social sorting, anticipatory governance, and secondary uses and control creep. The paper concludes by arguing for greater conceptual work and empirical research to underpin and flesh out critical data studies.