Data Citizens and the Right to Data

• In Event: Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data - I

Abstract

Environmental sensors are meant to activate particular forms of data-oriented envi¬ronmental citizenship. Plugging in a digital kit and join¬ing a disparate community of users are the steps to be followed that in principle should mobilize environmental data and rights in the making. Yet rather than unfold a more straightforward form of political engagement, citizen sensing kits and the citizen data they generate can often given rise to even more complex struggles with urban environmental life. Considerable work goes in to collecting and analyzing data sets, yet citizen data is often treated with suspicion and disregarded by regulators and industry. Indeed, even the right of citizens to monitor environments can be thrown into question, with practices, protocols and devices all subject to legal intervention and scrutiny. The promise of the political subject who is meant to form through the collection and communication of envi¬ronmental data is then troubled. It is at this site of struggle that other forms of data citizens proliferate, less as fully formed legal actors, and more as persons attached to, yet haunted by, the promises of democratic life that might be facilitated through data. This presentation will discuss how data citizens are constituted through practices of forming and making evidence, whether by generating their own data or compiling and analyzing diverse datasets—or both. It will consider how rights to data are expressed through uneven evidentiary techniques that constitute ongoing processes for materializing data citizenship as affective and collective infrastructures for engaging with and intervening in urban worlds.

Author

• Jennifer Gabrys, University of Cambridge