On Feminist Arts + Sciences of Noticing: Review and Reconnection in Community Data Lab

• In Event: Regenerating Research Culture: Feminist STS Approaches to STEM Graduate Methods

Abstract

Cultivating new techniques for extracting and assigning value to signal drawn from dynamic data hauls of user behavior and system feedback lies at the heart of the rapid rise of contemporary data science research methods. Centrally defined by aspirations for managing volume, velocity and scale as specifically quantitative assets for data collection and analysis, emerging data science methods and the version of “big data’s promise” they pursue (as most actively modeled by data-driven internet companies), foster research practices that promise to uncover new forms of actionable intelligence hidden within expanding pools of digital tracked data. Against such contemporary developments, feminist science and technology studies scholars have argued for alternative pathways to generate potentials for remaking worlds. Alongside global studies scholars, they argue for the need to foster “new arts of noticing” (Tsing 2015) and a “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) that could specifically allow researchers to get outside dominant frameworks and tempos of modernity around progress. Feminist STS’ers thus underscore how other frames and tempos - defined by a resistance to the imperatives of accelerated speed, global scale, and forward motion as the only supposed paths to transformation - might open new modes of thinking and acting in the world. This paper thus presents one US public university’s campus-based design - The Community Data Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign – as an experimental effort to foster “new arts of noticing” via an interdisciplinary graduate pedagogy and lab setting exploring other means for recognizing value and possibility in patient tempos, local scales, and non-forward motion. Acting as research collaborators with a local government’s data analysis efforts, the lab’s engagements explore what new forms of value feminist qualitative research methods and analysis techniques can bring in dialogue with local civic institutions’ growing efforts to leverage data infrastructures and expand data methods. Centering new frames for patience, review and reconsideration, local situatedness over global scale, and reconnectivity over efficiency, as assets for responsible community data practice, the lab explores and models what lessons engaging with a local data actor and steward – rather than a large data-driven corporation that big data frames have tended to “fetishize” (Crawford and boyd 2014) – can reveal for developing “new arts of noticing” in research methods. Arguably, following the varied global scandals surrounding Internet companies’ use and abuse of user data pools, and the insistence of data science advocates and Internet companies alike still that their techniques will yield the best means for cultivating new forms of recognition in data, and of making otherwise invisible connections to transform social worlds, such new explorations on the value and work of interdisciplinary feminist STS pedagogy couldn’t be more urgent.

Author

• Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign