Reconnecting Data Visualization to its Anti-Racist Activist Roots through Youth Participatory Science

• In Event: Addressing Issues in Environmental Justice Education through Collective Power in Chicagoland and Southern California

Abstract

1. Objective

This paper calls for “unforgetting histories” by reconnecting data visualization with Duboisian roots, using visualization tools in youth participatory science (YPS) projects to “imagine [alternative] futures.”

2. Perspective

Data visualization has become popular in educational research and in K12 curriculum (Daniel, 2019; LaMar & Boaler, 2021). But studies in this realm often avoid dealing with issues of race, even though racism can emerge during seemingly uncontroversial data visualization lessons (Philip et al., 2016). This has led to calls for humanizing data science education (Lee et al., 2021), which have been taken up to engage students with data visualizations to make sense of socio-ecological systems (Lanouette et al., 2025). Justice-oriented data science education requires disrupting dichotomies between thinking/feeling while reimagining data science questions (Khan et al, 2022). We argue this reimagination includes ‘unforgetting’ the history of WEB DuBois’s groundbreaking data visualization techniques to advocate for racial justice (Battle-Baptiste & Rusert, 2018).

3. Methods

We combine teacher solidarity co-design (Philip et al, 2022) with cutting- edge computing tools to democratize visualization of large urban data sets (Author and colleagues, 2024). Computing tools like Urban Toolkit and Curio have facilitated the study of myriad pressing urban problems, including sidewalk accessibility and heat island effects. This project aims to couple these tools with YPS to support high school students’ socioecological sense-making about problems of environmental justice.

4. Data sources

For several years, we organized conferences where secondary students around our city shared YPS projects addressing local problems of environmental racism (Authors, 2021). Beginning in 2022, the call for abstracts included three categories named for transformative intellectuals, including: “WEB DuBois Visualizing Data for Change.” Here, we share our co-designed call for these sessions and our analysis of students’ abstracts across two years. This analysis informs an examination of revisions to the call and emerging co-design to scaffold students’ creation of data visualizations with computing tools.

5. Substantiated conclusions

A DuBoisian orientation attends to dignity for people and places, creating opportunities for students to appropriate technical skills in service of community-relevant issues. This positions data visualizations as tools for activism against environmental racism. Publicly available data sets make YPS projects feasible when barriers prevent students from collecting environmental data (e.g. inaccessible instruments; school policy constraints). For example, in one YPS abstract, students described visualizing the location of Superfund sites against demographic data, “throughout the state of Illinois in terms of the variables at their locations which indicate environmental discrimination, such as population, race, and median household income.”

6. Significance

Projects emerging from this work create opportunities for intertwined scientific and civic reasoning (Linn & Wiley, 2024). Reclaiming data visualization as a tool for anti-racist activism, in the DuBoisian tradition, resists recent federal attacks on both critical education and public datasets. We prioritize students and teachers interrogating the relationships between scientific enterprise and social movements (Philip & Azevedo, 2017).

Authors

• Alejandra Frausto, Northwestern University

• Daniel Morales-Doyle, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Fabio Miranda, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Kaleb Germinaro, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Valeria Herrera, University of Illinois at Chicago