Abstract
In the age of datafication, scholars have repeatedly shown that the counting of people is as much a political act as it is an enumerative one. As a result, grassroots initiatives are increasingly appropriating the art of statistics, transforming numbers into instruments of political and social resistance in the quest for a more authentic representation of society. Through an intersectional lens and attention to data politics, data infrastructures, and affective narratives, this project aims to delve into the nature and implications of bottom-up datafication, considering data an active agent in shaping social constructs. Drawing upon Actor-Network Theory and employing a qualitative mixed-methods approach, it seeks to unpack bottom-up datafication as a socio-technical phenomenon, exploring its networks, ontologies, ethics, and politics. By turning an ethnographic eye to two initiatives that collect data on and with marginalized citizens in Brazil and Germany from the bottom up, this project sheds light on the technopolitical infrastructure, the political impact, and the affective implications that engagement in the production and circulation of data from the bottom up has on identity, subjectivity, and imaginaries of citizenship. Finally, situated within critical data studies, this interdisciplinary project aims to develop an ethnographic theory of bottom-up datafication that contributes to the production of intersectional and inclusive data practices.
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