Data compositions and imperial formations

• In Event: Data Worldings and Post/colonial Connectedness I

Abstract

In this paper we want to attend to “data compositions” - the ways in which digital data are put together as well as objectified - and how they are embedded in or intersect with what Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial formations”, ongoing and implicit processes of devastation “defined by racialized relations of allocations and appropriations” (2008). How are data infrastructures entangled with and re-shaping colonial territorialities and histories? In what ways do data practices rely on the re-iteration or distortion of heterogeneous registers of colonial power, like expansion, standardisation, assimilation, aggregation and discrimination? Might these data processes figure new qualities and intensities of the colonial as e.g. “data colonialism” (Thatcher et al. 2016)? To what extent are current data collection projects steeped in the logics of imperial explorations and travels? Do novel data compositions continue the colonial classification complex and the idea of number as an instrument of colonial control (Appadurai 1993)? How can we reconstruct the theoretical categories which govern data worldings in relation to historical interconnectedness? How can data worldings allow for what Verran (2002) calls “postcolonial moments” that disrupt unequal distributions of power, resources and agency?

Based on empirically-grounded reflections on data compositions from our respective fields, the Brazilian Amazon and the natural history museum, we suggest a number of problem spaces and heuristic devices which help figure and give form to the intersections of data compositions and imperial formations.

Authors

• Antonia Walford, University College London

• Tahani Nadim, Museum fuer Naturkunde