| Description | Join the Department of Human Centered Design for our spring Preliminary Exam presentations. HCDE doctoral students in their second year of the PhD program will overview their research project, discuss research methods and any results thus far, and describe how this research contributes to the field. Presentations will be about 15 minutes with time for a brief Q&A after each talk.
From Data Activism to Activism in a Time of Dataism: Affirming Epistemological Heterogeneity in Social Movements
McKane Andrus, HCDE PhD studentIn this paper, we seek to situate the data practices of grassroots activists within the hegemony of dataism in order to better understand the growing number of cases where activists are disempowered by data, even as they appropriate it towards their own ends. The shift towards data-driven governance represents a consolidation of power that has shaped what are considered acceptable means to “know” the world through, and we argue that buying into these privileged epistemologies can pave over other ways of knowing that are central to social movement practices of resistance and worldbuilding. Building off of Muravyov’s (2022) concept of “epistemological ambiguity,” we demonstrate how the practice of data-focused activism requires complex navigations between data-based epistemologies and the heterogenous, experiential, and relational epistemologies that characterize social movements. Through two case studies drawn from existing scholarship and first-hand accounts about social audits in Capetown, South Africa and countermapping in the San Francisco Bay Area, we identify various points at which data activists have the difficult task of resisting the reductionistic, detached views of dataism when employing datafied tactics. In addition to these case studies, we present a third, original case study of Seattle-based, non-data-focused activists that actively refuse and seek to undermine the city’s data-centric view of homelessness by disseminating on-the-ground perspectives. Though this form of activism is unlikely to be considered “data activism” as it does not instrumentalize or target data, we argue it illuminates an important pathway for challenging data power. Synthesizing the findings of these three case studies, we provide an analytical model of how carving out more space for generative, epistemological refusals can in turn support more value-aligned navigations of epistemological ambiguity that resist dataism. Finally, we explore how these findings can be built upon through critical data literacy pedagogies to help learners navigate datafied political arenas.
View the full prelims schedule:
April 19, 2024April 23, 2024 |
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