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Informational Citizenship: Toward a Global Ethnography of Practices and Infrastructures of Datafication in the Global South

Project description

Assessing new intersections between data and citizenship in the Global South

Big data has played a significant role in promoting civil rights, increasing state accountability and reducing inequality in the Global South. This is because grassroots initiatives are generating and analysing their own numbers to fill statistical gaps and advance their social and political causes. The EU-funded InfoCitizen project will study citizenship practices and technologies in Brazil, Germany, Kenya, Portugal and Tanzania. It will combine insights from the social studies of quantification, the anthropology of data, and citizenship studies to explore data produced by experts and citizens across top-down and bottom-up data ecosystems. InfoCitizen will use the concept of informational citizenship to develop a global and comparative ethnography of datafication practices, their impacts on law- and policy-making, and their effects on individuals, communities and institutions.

Objective

Data has been extolled as the new frontier of development. Whereas western elite actors have contested big data for its flattening of social life and information extraction, grassroots initiatives have been championing big data to promote citizen rights, improve state accountability, and reduce inequality.
InfoCitizen will:
(1) study the citizenship practices and technologies coalescing around model initiatives to produce and circulate data in the Global South. We contend that for favela residents in Brazil, ethnic minorities in Portugal and Germany, and poor citizens in Tanzania and Kenya, far from splintering and prying, data has the potential to promote cultural change, political identity, and economic wellbeing via better, faster, and more reliable public and private statistics.
(2) blend 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, we will illuminate 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.
(3) combine archival, digital, audiovisual, and quanti-qualitative methods to unpack the toolscensuses, smartphones, policy reportsand actorsNGOs, data labs, legal commissionscrystallizing in the wake of grassroots numbers. We propose a global and comparative ethnography of datafied subjectivities and their interplay with transnational networks of expertisesuch as think tanks, governments, and businesses.
(4) generate applied and analytical research and a unique database of quantification tools and practices to critically probe the imaginaries, contingencies, materialities, and spaces of data for radical democratic change today.

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Host institution

UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 499 931,00
Address
PRINSSTRAAT 13
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium

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Region
Vlaams Gewest Prov. Antwerpen Arr. Antwerpen
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 499 931,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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