No Learning Lost Here: Youth Critical Data Practices in the COVID-19 Multi-Pandemic

• In Event: Data Literacy in Context: Culturally Oriented and Place-Based Learning Through Data

Abstract

Through long-term Research+Practice Partnerships in the midwestern and western US, we sought to understand what/how community partners learn about and take action on COVID-19 and justice-related concerns. We ask: How do minoritized youth engage in data activism in relation to their meaning making around COVID-19 and its intersections with economic and racial injustice?
We draw upon theories of data activism and data justice as forms of consequential learning through critical social practice within communities (Taylor L., 2017). We define data activism as social practices that take a critical approach to “big data” (Milan, 2019), in response to justice-related concerns of pandemic datafication. As datafication introduces new challenges of representation and positioning of people and the world (Stornaiuolo, 2020), we give witness to youth resisting, disrupting, and transforming such challenges during/through innovative digital navigations of crisis events (Goldkind et al., 2018; Vakil, 2018).
Using a historicized and future-oriented participatory methodological approach, we give witness to and learn with youth. To attend to power in our remote methods, we drew upon practices of critical witnessing and being with—practices toward conscientization, social transformation and the public good of communities historically marginalized by systemic inequities (Villenas, 2019). From March 2020 - June 2021, we engaged in multiple rounds of dialogic conversations and experience sampling methods with 42 youth and young adults in partner communities. Dialogic conversations (60-240 minutes/participant/round) focused on: COVID-19 information accessed or applied towards decision-making; how efforts were situated within personal/community COVID-19 experiences and networks. We co-analyzed data with participants using critical inquiry/grounded theory, in a continuities/contradictions approach.
Youth demonstrated that coordinating efforts across spaces and platforms aided in
confronting contentious spaces of manipulation in and with data and data structures affecting
real lives in real time. This included hanging out in the tensions and spaces of movement in
between big and small data to challenge and advance learning towards producing meaning that
is deeper and more impactful towards goals of a more just present and future. In response to the
limits of big data, youth expressed powerful forms of agency as they engaged in critical data
practices of remixing, recontextualizing and repositioning
. They
leveraged the spaces in
between big and small data to infrastructure alternative possibilities for enacting critical data
agency, including redefining big data as large-scale aggregations of small data. Youth presented
their engagement on TikTok, SnapChat, and other places as valid data, disaggregated from
invisibility and re-clustered with meaning through coalition-sharing. While youths' agency with
data is complicated in how it can be mediated by often-distant and unseen commercial interests
and platform imperatives in a datafied society, they actively sought to push back against how
data infrastructures position them as powerless. They curated, shared, debated and co-analyzed
data on their lives as wholly visible with provenance and immediate utility, compared to
sterilizing, impersonal big data.
Implications for studies of learning with and through data practices in everyday life in relation to issues of justice are discussed.

Authors

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Day W Greenberg, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Chandler Turner

• Devon Riter, University of Michigan

• Leslie R. Herrenkohl, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Elizabeth A. Davis, University of Michigan

• Tammy Quinn Tasker, University of Michigan