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- Convenor:
-
Yuhan Wang
(Bath Spa University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel draws on STS scholarship to challenge data extraction infrastructures that render humans into ‘data beings.’ By calling for conceptual and practical explorations, it seeks to build alternative infrastructures for data sovereignty, knowledge production, and governance.
Description
The prevalence of digital platforms and smart devices has made datafication pervasive, positioning individuals as passive data beings: objects for data extraction. Our data are continuously harvested, optimised, commercialised, and weaponised for control (Zuboff, 2019). This process is driven primarily by the infrastructure for data extraction (e.g., everyday platforms) and the infrastructure for knowledge that frames data as inevitable and beneficial for human futures.
To confront these two layers of data infrastructure predominantly designed by big tech companies, this panel utilises the infrastructure scholarship (Star and Ruhleder, 1996) from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to challenge the socio-technical arrangements and knowledge production that subject humans as data beings, while also seeking more resilient and sustainable ways of knowing about and working with data.
Through lived examples, conceptual development, and practical designs, this panel aims to demonstrate how STS can function as a toolkit to transform the feeling of technological dystopia into robust, actionable plans for data knowledge, practices, and governance.
This panel invites conceptual and practical explorations focused on reimagining data infrastructures, with a particular interest in the following topics:
Challenging hegemonic practices: Analysing how large technology companies build infrastructures for data extraction, for example, by promoting data-hungry designs and specific marketing narratives.
Infrastructures for data sovereignty: Proposing designs for data infrastructures that resist unrestricted, massive data extraction, prioritise user agency, and promote reciprocal data relations, for example, AI crawler blockers, Solid, and data donation.
Grounding the future: Utilising the history and philosophy of technology to contextualise current circumstances and inspire acts of speculation and resistance.