Feminist data studies

Feminist data studies is a set of approaches to the rise of data and computational culture, or what has been referred to as datafication and the datalogical. Feminist data studies encompasses feminist data visualization, digital humanities, big data, algorithms, AI, machine learning, quantification and datalogical and computational turns. It examines these areas in relation to meaning making, epistemology and consumption, practices, production, ontology and labour. In tandem with the way that Foucault argued that knowledge is power, data as a dominant form of knowledge production can be thought of as power. Data science, data collection, data gathering and visualisation technologies have reached an ascendance in science, politics education and culture, as computation has become cultural and social. Computational culture is structured through systems which require and construct phenomena in the world to be countable, and to feature as data points. Data collection and search is fundamental to knowledge production in this economy, and centres of power are clustered and intensified through data processing capacity. For example, government, border agencies, stock markets, banks, search engines, sciences and technology of all kinds centre around collecting, producing and interpreting data. Further, almost all aspects of knowledge production are understood as authoritative through this lens and the arts and humanities have also been reformulated as digital. Feminist data studies examines the power relations of data, with particular attention to the ways in which the politics of those power relations structure societies, and reproduce and exacerbate inequality. It is important to understand it as both a productive intervention, making things in the world, and a deconstructive intervention offering critical analysis.