Data as Sites of Youth Justice Work in the COVID-19 Multi-Pandemic

• In Event: #TheMoreYouKnow: Critical Data Practices With New Digital Media and Technologies Toward Justice

Abstract

Objectives
This study investigates how youth from two US cities engage in critical data practices as they learn and take action in relation to COVID-19 in real time, and how this is shaped by justice-related concerns. Youths’ experiences in the pandemic have been rendered through data, or datafied (Cukier & Mayer-Schoenberger, 2013), informing their processes of coming-to-know and act in the pandemic. As datafication reveals an array of asymmetries connected to racial and economic injustices, we give witness to youths’ innovative digital navigations of crisis events (Goldkind et al., 2018). We argue that youth have a developing critical awareness of these powered processes, and that they direct critical data practices towards navigating contentious dimensions of/in/with data infrastructures to resist, protect, and/or transform experiences. We are interested in these ethical and political dimensions of youth practice to learn and act in a datafied world. We ask: How do youth engage in critical data practices as a part of their everyday learning and action-taking related to COVID-19 and its intersections with in/justice?

Framework and Methods
Guided by theories of critical data literacies and data justice and using a historicized and future-oriented participatory methodological approach, we seek to give witness to and learn with youth and community (Villenas, 2019). This requires centering participant voices via methods such as open-ended, dialogic interviews with co-determined protocols and co-analyzed findings. Data were co-generated March 2020 to June 2021 with 23 youth across 2 sites: a Midwestern urban community with whom we have collaborated since 2006, and a West Coast urban community with whom we have collaborated since 2013. Data were co-analyzed using critical grounded theory.

Findings and Significance
Findings show how youth engaged in re-imagining data as sites of justice work over what and who counts while developing data-rich narratives of COVID-19. Cutting across these acts were efforts to challenge dehumanizing data narratives especially in racialized ways, organized into two categories of practice: (1) youth engagement with/in the world as multidimensional, whole people who matter (and whose communities matter), and (2) youth production of alternative data infrastructures for new social futures. These practices served as a collaborative campaign to restructure power to gain access and control over data that shape their lives in the COVID-19 multi-pandemic. For example, in making sense of and taking action in their datafied pandemic-riddled worlds, youth repositioned themselves into new aggregations of data as fully human and agentic people. When youth discovered areas where data were sparse and/or unrelatable to them and their communities, they remixed, reimagined, and reported out data towards rebalancing power.

These efforts created a louder, more visible presence of youth in the world during a time of crisis when adults in power didn’t have answers. The absence of adult knowledge did not render youth powerless, instead doing the opposite, as youths’ data practices revealed their instrumentality to navigate their reality in data-rich ways, and to restructure it. Implications for studies of learning with/through data practices in everyday life in relation to issues of justice are discussed.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Day W. Greenberg, Indiana University

• Chandler Turner, University of Michigan

• Leslie R. Herrenkohl, University of Michigan