Antonia Walford

The world is talking ‘data’. The early hype around the potential of “Big” data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way to dystopian visions of rampant commodification, the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, bodily alienation, and shadowy data doubles. In response, critical voices are drawing on tropes familiar to anthropologists to find positions of critique: contextualization, community, sovereignty, power. Data justice has become a mobilising concept. We convene this workshop to develop a distinctively anthropological approach to the politics of data and, through this, to data justice. Taking data as an ethnographic object, social project, and site of cultural values, the workshop will address two main areas: the contested political spaces that have been opened up by data and the relationship between data and place.