****OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPANTS****
Data Justice has gained popularity across academic and activist worlds over the past 10 years. The dominant meaning of the term in (anglophone) scholarship so far often indicates a general concern with how datafication has led to threats to privacy, increased state surveillance and the expansions of capitalism into people’s everyday lives. As such, it is a useful term to both draw attention to, and promote efforts toward countering, the private-public extractive industries and racialised capitalism that characterises Big Data. However, as Dencik et al point out, its meaning is also in practice heterogeneous and fluid, tied to the different ways people are trying to fight for what matters to them. In fact, key debates about privacy, surveillance and commodification with regards to Big Data and AI have for the most part been completely over-determined by what is happening in Europe and the US, leading to some scholars recently calling for a “de-westernisation” of our approaches to data justice (Dencik et al 2022; cf Mertia 2020).
This collection seeks to expand and ground this call to de-westernise data justice, by putting data justice in context in three ways:
- De-familiarise and expand what is meant by ‘data justice’
- Pluralise the de-westernisation of data justice through an attention to multiple and intersecting axes, scales and configurations of power
- Ground interrogations in research that grapples with data justice ambivalences and tensions.
Firstly, it seeks to expand the conversation beyond the confines of the current data justice movement in euroamerica by de-familiarising what is meant by “data justice”. It draws attention to the fact that the heterogeneity in practices of data justice speaks not only to the multiplicity of ways in which people understand and enact ‘data’ and ‘justice’, but also to the multiple ways that data and justice can be put in relation to each other in different social, political and cultural contexts. Alongside those who are actively developing alternative frameworks of ‘data justice’, therefore, we are also interested in collaborating with practitioners and academics who may not frame themselves as part of a data justice movement at all, but who are working to connect and reframe data and justice in different settings – from established mobilisations such as the indigenous data sovereignty movement, to more informal networks of resistance that respond to specific injustices. It might also include those who have unintentionally ended up working with data in the context of more expansive social justice efforts, or those working with data who have ended up being drawn into questions of justice. Here, justice could be framed as participatory, ad hoc and vernacular, and data as analog, small-scale or ephemeral.
Secondly, it seeks to pluralise the frame of global north/global south/s which often characterises efforts to de-westernise. Here we note that it is not just the ‘global south/s’ which are heterogeneous – even as they are incessantly required to provide the impetus for heterogeneity – but even within the global north or euroamerican context there are distinct differences in the ways in which issues of data and justice are being framed and enacted at different scales. From a socio-legal perspective, for example, many European countries have developed a concept of a data subject, which is not present in the US context; or as Simone Browne has pointed out, surveillance within the US context is necropolitically differentiated for black communities. Whilst acknowledging the usefulness of strategic essentialisms, in Spivak’s famous words, nevertheless this collection seeks to work with practitioners and scholars who are interested in interrogating the coherence of a “west” from which to de-westernise.
Thirdly, this collection seeks to ground these enquiries in research that grapples with the ambivalences of the call for data justice. These might be ambivalences of scale and description, which would allow us to see practices of datafication as both global, systemic or geopolitical, and also intimate, local and everyday. For example, in the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed new kinds of blurriness between planetary, community, and bodily data, and the collisions of old and new literacies of meaning-making and representation of data. Other ambivalences to draw out might be political, seeking to understand the way in which attempts at data justice can eclipse some forms of life even as it seeks to ensure the wellbeing of others. For example, in the environmental data justice movement, activists and academics have pointed out the tension between the requirement for open access to data that environmental justice demands, and the need for privacy and restricted access that data justice often calls for. We are interested in working ethnographically and empirically with these and other ambivalences and tensions of data justice.
Lastly, this collection is also committed to experimenting with ways of doing data and justice that reflect its aims. Publication venue, submission languages and questions of translation, forms and styles of writing, other forms of disseminating and possibilities for further collaboration are all open questions that can be discussed with all potential participants. If you would like to submit a paper in a language that is not English, let us know. This cfp is open to all, irrespective of discipline and not restricted to those working in academia.
If interested or you have further questions, please contact Tone, Sandeep and Catarina on: