What Does Data Matter? Putting the Work to Work in Policy Futurities

• In Event: 52.084 - Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: 52.084-7 - Putting the Work to Work: Getting Smart, Messy, and Lost With the Work of Patti Lather

Abstract

Patti Lather's work has always asked us to trouble data, put our research under scrutiny and work the "ruins" theoretically and methodologically. Putting this work to work in the policy arena, at policy tables where policy issues are discussed, defined and programmed for has remained an arena that seems immune to ruins thinking. This paper explores what it means to think amidst the ruins in policy studies. Utilizing fifteen years of experience working with education and social welfare agencies focused on increasing young mother's education access, the author provides vignettes of what it has looked like and meant to be the poststructural feminist at the policy table. Through this narrative, the author takes up recent discussions of why data matters--with many calling for data to be put under erasure--to focus on a discussion and question of "what does data matter?" The author argues for the necessity of a continued engagement with data toward imagining alternative temporalities and futurities and provides examples of what this look like in policy studies.

Author

• Wanda Pillow, University of Utah