Abstract
Data is being touted as the new frontier of development. Across the Global South, grassroots schemes have already been championing big data to promote citizen rights, increase state accountability, and reduce inequality. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence of the use of data as a token of development, we know very little about the everyday realities of those making and circulating their own numbers. Recent scholarship focuses either on the politics of official statistics or on the activist use of statistics to denounce domination. We need granular and interlinked accounts of how, why, and when people engage with numbers to grasp their impacts on identity, subjectivity, and public policy. This requires a systematic and interlinked study of the top-down and bottom-up dimensions of data-for-development initiatives that seek to involve both citizens and experts in their design and implementation.
This project explores how datafication is changing the means and meanings of sociocultural and political-economic belonging through local and everyday engagements with information in the Global South. In the context of data for development, it asks: how are datafication tools being mobilized by private and philanthropic actors (the politics of datafication)? And how are grassroots actors being involved in and using these tools to redefine their terms of citizenship (the poetics of datafication)?
Empirically, the project investigates how multi-scalar partnerships between private donors and social impact businesses are marshaling technology in innovative ways to promote participatory and transformative forms of monitoring and evaluation. It critically examines how these organizations are refashioning the meaning and measuring of "social impact" by leveraging local knowledge via participatory technologies and citizen-generated data. The project also probes the grassroots epistemologies and quantification tools of bottom-up data ecosystems, the transnational networks of expertise and action unfolding from the intersection of top-down and bottom-up data, and the distinctive datafied subjectivities of engaged citizens involved in bottom-up data. Such a multidimensional focus on datafication is crucial to grasp the knowledge regimes and legibility politics generated by bottom-up quantification tools, but also the affective impacts of these tools in daily exchanges between grassroots experts and engaged citizens. The project will thus also assess the extent to which these data ecosystems are effectively filling data gaps, creating public recognition, galvanizing participation, and engaging decolonial development.
This project is part of a broader ERC-funded Starting Grant, which studies the citizenship practices and technologies coalescing around model initiatives to produce and circulate data in the Global South. The broader project blends insights from the social studies of quantification, the anthropology of data, and citizenship studies to grasp data produced by experts and citizens across top-down and bottom-up data ecosystems. Via the concept of informational citizenship, it sheds light on the politics (infrastructures, epistemologies, visibilities) and poetics (experiences, socialities, and affects) of datafication, their impacts on law- and policymaking, and their effects on individuals, communities, and institutions in Brazil, Portugal, Germany, Tanzania, and Kenya.
The individual project maximizes its societal and academic impact by taking part in the activities and results of this umbrella research. It will participate in the generation of applied outputs (such as policy-oriented reports, networking conferences, a video documentary, and a podcast) and analytical outputs (such as an interactive database to visualize and communicate results to non-academic audiences) aimed at critically probing the imaginaries, contingencies, materialities, and spaces of data for radical democratic change today.
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