Datafied Publics

Panel at the 2024 quadrennial joint meeting of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Amsterdam, 16-19 July 2024.

Abstract

Marres’s term ‘material participation’ describes how objects facilitate political action through everyday doing and making (2012). It is a useful theory for thinking about data publics – for instance, people with similar technical interests who come together to work with datasets and software to political ends. We can also use material participation to understand data publics in another way, by considering how data has “the capacities to organize publics” under the gaze of data-intensive systems (Ibid p. 9). We can ask how people politically mobilise when they are subject to commercial and government data systems that algorithmically govern them but remain opaque. Such collectives come together as a particular type of data public – a datafied public – to understand the ways they are sorted, shaped and targeted and to demand greater control over these processes.

How do datafied publics take shape and what forms of participation do they engage in to? What role do calls for transparency and democratic oversight play towards actual, substantive political accountability of these systems (Annany and Crawford 2016)? From health to social security and policing, the role of datafication in public participation demands renewed theoretical-empirical attention.