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 tools—censuses, smartphones, policy reports—and actors—NGOs, data labs, legal commissions—crystallizing in the wake of grassroots numbers. We propose a global and comparative ethnography of datafied subjectivities and their interplay with transnational networks of expertise—such 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.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Host institution
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium