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Short abstract:

In this study, we demonstrate how the emerging equity-centered data initiatives in US local governments experiment with relational knowledge and accountability models discussed in feminist and anti-colonial STS. We discuss their effects in decentralizing the institutional power of knowledge.

Long abstract:

With its symbolic valence of objectivity and legitimacy in societies, data is often considered useful in accountability processes among groups. But what if the assumptions no longer hold among communities of practice? How is data’s role in public decision-making redefined when groups aim to put data work for other social values like equity or justice?

In our current study, we investigate how practitioners in US local governance navigate the questions above in equity-centered data initiatives in state and city governments. Amid renewed public discourse on social justice, these initiatives have invited various actors, including government agencies, NGOs, and their partnering tech vendors, to come up with different forms of alternative knowledge practices: some developed indicators to measure “equity level” while others created novel databases for local knowledge and lived experiences. New digital interfaces were designed to mediate the conflicting realities of stakeholders.

Analyzing our interviews and ethnographic engagements with the organizations, we notice that these interventions, despite their differences, commonly elevate the relationality constituting urban lives. They used digital technologies to document historic relations among the actors and redefine data as a medium/subject of negotiation. Situating the observations in the feminist and anticolonial discourse of power and knowledge, we suggest that these emerging practices experiment with the relational knowledge and accountability model. Asking how these experiments decentralize the power to knowledge in government institutions, we discuss the transformative power of relational data practices to facilitate larger structural shifts toward spatial and social justice.