Counting, Debunking, Making, Witnessing, Shielding: What Critical Data Studies Can Learn from Data Activism During the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to shift data power—the power of data structures as well as the power exerted by data on social life—in two directions. Key state functions and infrastructure are transferred to private corporations at the expenses of state sovereignty and oversight, while individual control over personal information such as political preferences and biomedical data is delegated to quasi-monopolistic platforms. Data activism as the civil society response to data power and the field of critical data studies in its role of the scholarly interpreter of a datafied society can both help us make sense of these challenges. Dialoguing with political sociology, this chapter explores data activism as a counterforce to predominant data power, takes stock of its most recent evolutions, and identifies pathways for critical data studies in the post-pandemic world. First, it distinguishes five focal strategies for data activists as they grappled with the challenges of the first pandemic within a datafied society: counting, debunking, making, witnessing, and shielding. It then singles out three challenges for data activism in the post-pandemic world, namely the question of infrastructure, the diffusion of data poverty, and scarce digital literacy. This chapter concludes by deriving lessons learnt from data activism during the pandemic that point to potential new perspectives for critical data studies in the post-pandemic world.