Grand Intentions, Small Interventions: Climate Data Rescue as Counter-Data Action (original) (raw)
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Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 2018
The dismantlement of evidence-based environmental governance by the Trump administration requires new forms of activism that uphold science and environmental regulatory agencies while critiquing the politics of knowledge production. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) emerged after the November 2016 U.S. presidential elections, becoming an organization of over 175 volunteer researchers, technologists, archivists, and activists innovating more just forms of government accountability and environmental regulation. Our successes include: (1) leading a public movement to archive vulnerable federal data evidencing climate change and environmental injustice; (2) conducting multisited interviews of current and former federal agency personnel regarding the transition into the Trump administration; (3) tracking changes to federal websites. In this article, we conduct a “social movement organizational autoethnography” on the field of movements intersecting within EDGI and o...
Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together
Geo: Geography and Environment
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus-based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US. One project EDGI has undertaken is the grassroots archiving of government environmental data sets through our involvement with the DataRescue movement. However, over the past year, our focus has shifted from saving environmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures required for community stewardship of data: Data Together. Through this project, EDGI seeks to make data more accessible and environmental decision-making more accountable through new social and technical infrastructures. The shift from DataRescue to Data Together exemplifies EDGI's ongoing attempts to put an "environmental data justice" prioritising community self-determination into practice. By drawing on environmental justice, critical GIS, critical data studies, and emerging data justice scholarship, EDGI hopes to inform our ongoing engagement in projects that seek to enact alternative futures for data stewardship.
What difference does data make? Data management and social change
Online Information Review
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to expand on emergent data activism literature to draw distinctions between different types of data management practices undertaken by groups of data activists. Design/methodology/approach The authors offer three case studies that illuminate the data management strategies of these groups. Each group discussed in the case studies is devoted to representing a contentious political issue through data, but their data management practices differ in meaningful ways. The project Making Sense produces their own data on pollution in Kosovo. Fatal Encounters collects “missing data” on police homicides in the USA. The Environmental Data Governance Initiative hopes to keep vulnerable US data on climate change and environmental injustices in the public domain. Findings In analysing the three case studies, the authors surface how temporal dimensions, geographic scale and sociotechnical politics influence their differing data management strategies. Originality/...
Data Activism in Light of the Public Sphere
Krisis, 2018
‘Ayuda Ecuador,’ a deployment of the Ushahidi platform, was launched on April 16, 2016, after the first tremors of the earthquake that killed 660 people and injured 4,605 (USAID 2016). Within a matter of two hours, a group of ‘digital humanitarians’ – who typically comprise bloggers, techies and activists willing to volunteer their time to assist in emergencies remotely (Gutiérrez 2018a) — launched the deployment to ‘generate collectively data relevant to the emergency, threats, logistic needs and response that the affected population was experiencing (…) and effectively channel the efforts by different institutions and agencies’ (Ayuda Ecuador 2016). The Ushahidi platform – a non-profit tech company from Kenya that allows the visualization of crowdsourced crisis data for humanitarian purposes – is a proactive data activist organization, proactively employing software and data for humanitarian assistance (Gutiérrez 2018a). Data activism involves a series of practices ‘at the intersection of the social and the technological dimension of human action,’ aiming at either ‘resisting massive data collection,’ in the case of reactive data activists, or ‘actively pursuing the exploitation of available data for social change,’ in the case of proactive data activists (Milan and Gutiérrez 2015, 127). This article deals with the second type of data activism. Proactive data activism is currently being harnessed to understand, analyze and develop solutions to a range of social problems, from climate change and biodiversity loss, to inequality and human rights abuses (Hogan and Roberts 2015), as well as to assist in humanitarian crises, as in the case of the Ushahidi platform. Because of its capacity to generate alternative digital public spheres (called here APSs for short), this paper specifically refers to a type of proactive data activism termed ‘geoactivism,’ which employs interactive cartography to communicate and trigger action. In this paper, Geoactivism galvanized to address an emergency is called ‘crisis mapping,’ while geoactivism employed in evidence-gathering for advocacy is called ‘activist mapping’ (Gutiérrez 2018a). The cases mobilized to illustrate this article include mainly deployments of the Ushahidi platform, based on crowdsourced data, as well as other cases, including InfoAmazonia, which relies on public data, as well as crowdsourcing and sensors to generate data. They are introduced in the analysis because they are typical geoactivist organizations (Gutiérrez 2018a). To examine how APSs behave, I draw on ‘Why the net is not a public sphere’ (Dean 2003). Particularly useful are Jodi Dean’s reflections on how the net cannot be considered a public sphere, but a set of democratic configurations that she calls ‘neodemocracies’ (ibid., 105). Dean considers that the architecture of the public sphere is based on a set of components – specifically, site, goal and vehicle, as well as means and norms (2003, 96). I take this idea further to highlight facets of the APSs (see Table 1). The primary purpose of this paper is not to compare the public sphere and Dean’s neodemocracies, but to contribute to a theory of data activism, a relatively unexplored phenomenon. Therefore, the theoretical comparison provided in this paper is a heuristic exercise for enlarging the concept of the APS in data activism.
Data Activism as Essential Service
AMCIS 2021 Proceedings, 2021
From data collection to provide epidemiologic analysis to questions about privacy and surveillance, data has taken up an even more vital role with the COVID-19 pandemic: reliable data is required for decisionmaking and for measuring the effectiveness of strategies to control the virus. In general, citizens look up to governments to provide that information. However, a mix of inclination to opacity on the side of governments and a mistrust on the side of the citizens can open up the issue to data activism. Building on transparency studies and data activism literature, this research explores a case study of data activism in Brazil, where a group of volunteers consolidate and structure COVID-19 data for open access, replacing a fundamental attribute of the state during a pandemic. Because of its urgency and impact, a pandemic makes us rethink the role of data activism beyond issues of justice, accountability, and social change.
Archival Science, 2015
The archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest: a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records of the society. But I will stick by what I have said about other scholars, and argue that the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business. His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake. If so, the rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not, as so many scholars fear, the politicizing of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft (Zinn 1977). This special issue of Archival Science ''Archiving Activism and Activist Archiving'' examines the intersections between contemporary archival practice and activism in different national, political, socioeconomic , technological, archival settings, and inspired by a variety of motivations and objectives. The practices examined in these articles go beyond advocacy for more active archival approaches and incorporate the spaces and endeavours where archivists seek to creatively document political and social movement activism as well as those projects which engage with archives and the archival process as part or in support of political, human right and social movement activism.
The social imaginaries of data activism
Big Data & Society, 2019
Data activism, promoting new forms of civic and political engagement, has emerged as a response to problematic aspects of datafication that include tensions between data openness and data ownership, and asymmetries in terms of data usage and distribution. In this article, we discuss MyData, a data activism initiative originating in Finland, which aims to shape a more sustainable citizen-centric data economy by means of increasing individuals’ control of their personal data. Using data gathered during long-term participant-observation in collaborative projects with data activists, we explore the internal tensions of data activism by first outlining two different social imaginaries – technological and socio-critical – within MyData, and then merging them to open practical and analytical space for engaging with the socio-technical futures currently in the making. While the technological imaginary favours data infrastructures as corrective measures, the socio-critical imaginary questions the effectiveness of technological correction. Unpacking them clarifies the kinds of political and social alternatives that different social imaginaries ascribe to the notions underlying data activism, and highlights the need to consider the social structures in play. The more far-reaching goal of our exercise is to provide practical and analytical resources for critical engagement in the context of data activism. By merging technological and socio-critical imaginaries in the work of reimagining governing structures and knowledge practices alongside infrastruc- tural arrangements, scholars can depart from the most obvious forms of critique, influence data activism practice, and formulate data ethics and data futures.
Power in numbers/Power and numbers: Gentle data activism as strategic collaboration
Area, 2020
This short piece responds to a call to unpack the notion of gentle geographies conceptually and methodologically. This response considers gentleness in the context of “data activism,” which describes actions to resist the harmful effects of surveillance by corporate and state actors, as well as those that harness the potential of data to achieve grassroots social and political goals. Regarding the latter form, this piece considers the potential of an explicitly gentle form of data activism in which collaboration with policy actors is a central strategy, which contrasts it with a longer history of oppositional, or even “militant” forms of data activism. Gentleness is characterised here as a careful, consciously moderated, and above all, strategic mode of action; it can be deployed to advance specific activist goals and to exploit the growing allure of data in urban planning and governance circles. Through examples from Vancouver, Canada and Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, and by engaging with recent work on the connections between data and action, gentle data activism is put forward as a mode of action that merges power in numbers (in the sense of collaboration and diverse perspectives, but not in the sense of data as capable of action on its own) with power and numbers (an understanding of data's actionability as being contingent on a wider set of forces). This in/and distinction foregrounds a need for those engaged in data activism to carefully consider whether their actions are intended to achieve outcomes that are instrumental (achieving tangible changes) and/or normative (challenging power asymmetries). Gentle modes of action may be highly appropriate for goals such as influencing policies that affect marginalised communities, but gentleness may not be suitable for challenging the injustices at the root of marginalisation.