Care-ful data studies: or, what do we see, when we look at datafied societies through the lens of care?

ABSTRACT

In this special issue, we ask: What do we see when we look at datafied societies through the lens of care? Following the footsteps of feminist writers, activists, and academics who take care as a vantage point for scrutinising and reimaging technoscientific societies, this special issue brings together scholars from critical data studies who explore what we might learn (and see) when we apply care ethics to the study of datafication. To develop a view on datafied societies informed by ethics, concepts, and practices of care, we propose a move from critique to care in social studies of data-driven technologies. We specifically identify five moves in which a care lens provides a new perspective when studying datafication and datafied societies: (1) a move from data-driven technologies to socio-digital care arrangements, (2) a move from data science to data work and care, (3) a move from technical to situated modes of knowledge production, (4) a move from studying harms of datafication to the politics of vulnerability, and (5) a move towards building communities of care. Discussing how critical data studies and care ethics can mutually contribute to each other, this collection explores how this way of thinking can inform new ways of seeing datafied societies and imagine living and being well in more than human worlds nurtured by care.

KEYWORDS:

• Care-ful data studies
• critical data studies
• datafication
• data feminism
• ethics of care

Acknowledgements

The production of this special issue, too, has been a work of care. We wish to thank the journal editors, the authors, and the reviewers for their respective contributions to this collection. Acknowledging how some of this work takes place under conditions of precarity, it is important for us to stress that academic knowledge production within and outside of the field of critical and care-ful data studies requires care, humility, and solidarity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article

Notes

1 The metaphor of ‘vision’ for describing knowledge production has been widely discussed in (feminist) Science and Technology Studies e.g. Barad (2007). It also has been critically addressed in relation to disabilities and ableism (livingstone, 2018). In this editorial, we use the metaphor of vision in its feminist sense.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irina Zakharova

Irina Zakharova is postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. Her research is in the fields of data studies and feminist science and technology studies. Irina is interested in data practices in public welfare services provision, datafication of public education, and academic knowledge production in the datafied world. She received her doctoral degree in media and communication studies from the University of Bremen.

Juliane Jarke

Juliane Jarke is Professor of Digital Societies at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research attends to the increasing importance of digital data and algorithmic systems in the public sector, education and for ageing populations. She received her PhD in Organisation, Work and Technology from Lancaster University and has a background in computer science, philosophy and STS. Her latest book is Algorithmic Regimes: Methods, Interactions and Politics (Amsterdam University Press). Email: [email protected]