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Activating Context: Data Ethics, Data Sovereignty, Data Justice

Fri, September 6, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Eight, Iris

Abstract

The core topic of our panel speaks to methods and ontologies of activating data in context, toward building civic infrastructures of data ethics, data justice, and data sovereignty. In the research projects we present, we engage decolonial research practices, civic engagement, and innovation design across digital technologies to offer a critique of normative big data practices of municipal and industry bodies. Our work contributes to the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical data studies, with research and design methods that enact civic participatory modes of knowledge generation and mobilization of data as a right and public good. In presenting three case studies (with an expert respondent), our panel addresses challenges and innovation in designing intersectional and heterogeneous modalities of “data” (from the ethnographic to the pure metric). In this spirit, the papers address the legacy of chemical pollutants on native populations; the installation of autonomous sensor technology (known as Internet of Things or IoT) in the public spaces of urban capitals; and the appropriation of capitalist data models by the urban poor to reassert sovereignty over territory. The panel addresses global south and north conditions, speaking to opportunities for solidarity and collectivity across geographic and historical markers. Directly responsive to the 4S thematic of “Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations,” our work experiments with located, activist, and civic methods of making sense of data as a contextual function that produces a pointed critique of embedded and inherited paradigms of power, big data as a form of capital, empire.

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Individual Presentations

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