Reimagining Datafication: Critical and Feminist Agendas

Drawing together multifarious efforts to chip away at the dominant orders of digital life and academic work, this research cluster seeks to articulate new critical and feminist agendas for studying and confronting the problematics of datafication—that is, disjunctions between popular claims about the (real or imagined) benefits of datafied tools and knowledges and the (actual or potential) effects of data and their attendant technologies. 

Starting from an acknowledgment that data relations are social relations, “Reimagining Datafication” seeks intimate and interlinked connections afforded by critical and feminist inquiries into data technologies as sociotechnical phenomena. It brings together UW faculty and students exploring the the ways datafication both perpetuates and amplifies existing social fault lines and injustices and how it can be a means to envision new possibilities for transfeminist, anti-racist and anti-ableist digital futures that resist shallow and sanitized peans to “inclusivity” or de-radicalized appeals to “intersectionality.” In coming together, we are guided by questions like: What modes of relations—embodied, material, environmental, infrastructural—emerge in datafied worlds? Under what conditions do data appear as tools of control and securitization, and how might they serve ends of collectivity, love, or justice? As scholars, how do we confront data’s powers when we are also worn down—weary, spoonless, overwhelmed—by datafication’s demand for order, evaluation, and recognition? How can we sustain insurgent or resistant critical inquiries within datafied cultures typified by precarity and division? In pursuing these and other questions, we emphasize the ongoing necessity of feminist, critical, experimental and speculative modes of inquiry for understanding how digital data encode and extend unequal valorations of knowledge and asymmetrical distributions of power through datafication and its techniques of data collection, categorization, visualization, application, and use.