Toward a Hauntology on Data: On the Sociopolitical Forces of Data Assemblages

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 38
  In Roundtable Session: Racial Ontologies and New Materialist Methodologies

Abstract

As Avery Gordon (1997) reminds us, there are always already ghosts or hauntings in the seemingly present; what might be understood as an absence of presence, and a complex history and subjectivities. Indeed, the haunting demands sociopolitical significance as Derrida (1994) cogently states it “is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it”…“in the name of justice”. In this paper, I seek to begin to provide some theoretical articulations of, to, and with the ghosts of data assemblages.

While in the computational turn there has been increasingly more theorizing on data (de Freitas, Dixon-Román, & Lather, 2016; Gitelman, 2013; Kitchin, 2014), some of which posthumanist, few have focused their examination on the sociopolitical forces imbued in data. This paper will contribute to the philosophy of science on data by focusing on the extent to which data is always already imbued with the sociopolitical forces of racializations.

Author

• Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, The University of Pennsylvania