Politics of data and quantification as modes of governing (Part 1)

Abstract

Techniques and technology have played a major role in the studies of governance ever since the pioneering works of Michel Foucault. Performativity of classification, quantification, and datafication is nowadays a central tenet of a number of fields. STS has showed how politics play out on the level of producing scientific knowledge, governmentality studies have studied the diverse locations of governing, and recent work in critical data studies, data activism, and data justice has shown the political and normative variability of data practices. In addition to this theoretical expansion, material proliferation of digital data forces more practitioners than ever to engage with the politics of data. They must negotiate the competing political pressures of participating in, shaping, and sometimes rejecting digital assemblages.

Keeping good relations between citizens and data practitioners invites us to address the politics of data and its devices and techniques as a mode of governance. How do practitioners understand and navigate the political dilemmas of contemporary data practices? How do politics unfold, become visible, or remain invisible for practitioners? How are these dilemmas materialized in work, tools, and systems? How should we as researchers relate to such dilemmas? How does, if at all, recent attention to ethics and justice influence practitioner perceptions of data politics? The panel tries to expand STS discussion on data practices by inviting submissions that draw from sociology, political science, and media and communications. The panel welcomes especially empirical papers, but is also open to conceptual, theoretical, and philosophical papers that address data politics.

Individual Presentations

• Reading between the numbers: Tracing the politics of data through the practice of data journalism - Srravya C, IIIT Bangalore; Bidisha Chaudhuri, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore

• The limitations of data science in the non-profit sector – Why established political dynamics of non-profit data have lasting importance - Ville Aula, London School Of Economics & Political Science

• Data Methods and Knowledge Controversy in the Evolution of China's Family Planning Policy - Zhicong Shang, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Quantifying Ability, Shaping Ordinal Citizens: Assembling Disability Data in India - Kim Fernandes, University of Pennsylvania

• The Datafication Of Abortion Debates In Ecuador: A “Scientific” Clash Between Pro-choice And Pro-life Groups - Maria Elissa Torres Carrasco, Kaleidos Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography

Session Organizer

• Ville Aula, London School Of Economics & Political Science