Short Abstract

Interactive workshop and installation exploring novel ways of teaching ethical data work in practice as well as in theory. Participants will contribute to building a collective data ethics concept map and engage with ongoing projects through videos, exercises, games and posters.

Description

The Ethical Data Initiative (EDI) is a non-partisan platform fostering open discussions on data ethics, informed significantly by philosophical, historical, and social studies of science, and coordinated jointly by the TUM Think Tank (Munich) and the University of Exeter. Making data ethics material practical and accessible to learners in lower-resourced environments, alongside data scientists and practitioners in academia, public services, civic associations, and small/medium enterprises, is key to our long-term goal of promoting active ethical reflection at every stage of data work. In this Making and Doing session, we invite participants to engage with various ongoing EDI projects to explore novel teaching formats for data ethics: 1) Contribute to making a collective conceptual map of key data ethics concepts with co-produced definitions, sources, and their relations. Participants can share ideas individually on paper, or work with EDI team members to add nodes and connectors to interactive concept cartography software. 2) Explore data stories—short videos and vignettes that examine a concrete case-study and its implications for data ethics, based on academic research in critical data studies. We encourage participants to share reactions to the stories and link them to the concept map. 3) Further develop the data clinic format—an interactive collaboration and teaching format designed to bridge theory and practice in the realm of data governance and ethics, which we have been running since 2025 with students from the Technical University of Munich. 4) Test-play online and table games linked to data ethics concepts and data stories.