Dorothy Kidd: Data justice, counter-planning and contention: a research approach

Keynote in connection with a workshop by the Nordic Network for Datafication.

Data justice, counter-planning and contention: a research approach

Dorothy Kidd, University of San Francisco

This session presents a study of the use of data, and specifically counter-mapping, in two historical cycles of Indigenous resistance to oil pipelines in western Canada. It briefly summarizes the integral use of data in the European colonial project of mapping the land and sites of potential resource extraction, together with the mass surveillance and violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples; it thus confirms the long historical use of data to exert political, economic and cultural power and control and enclose, disappear and/or silence competing knowledges.

However, the study is not about digital inequities per se, but instead argues for centering enquiry about data justice within the specific contexts, histories and practices social movement actor contention.

The study examines three different Indigenous first nations and how they have used counter-mapping with the Canadian state and extractive industries as one part of their repertoires of political organizing in two historical cycles, the 1970s and the current period.

My findings suggest that in each case they designed and developed collective data collection that not only countered the knowledge-making systems and discourses of the state, but also benefited their collective knowledge and use of their territories, and in the process developed new collective imaginaries, identities and new forms of governance.

The presentation ends by discussing how to develop research approaches about data justice that begin with the contentious, and constitutive practices of social justice movements in specific contexts and locales.

Participation in the lecture is free, but requires registration via email to anne.kaun@sh.se.