Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice

The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice project aims to widen the lens of current thinking around data justice and to provide actionable resources that will help policymakers, practitioners, and impacted communities gain a broader understanding of what equitable, freedom-promoting, and rights-sustaining data collection, governance, and use should look like in increasingly dynamic and global data innovation ecosystems. Before the advent of data justice research several years ago, prevailing approaches to data ethics and governance tended to frame issues surrounding the societal impacts of datafication and the increasing pervasiveness of data-intensive technologies almost exclusively in terms of data protection, individual rights, privacy, efficiency, and security. They likewise tended largely to focus on building technical solutions to potential harms rather than on interrogating the social structures, human choices, and sociotechnical practices that lie behind the myriad predicaments arising out of an ever more “datafied society”. The first wave of data justice scholarship—emerging in the pathbreaking work undertaken by the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University and the Global Data Justice project at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society—sought to move beyond these limitations by situating the ethical challenges posed by datafication in the wider context of social justice concerns. This meant that data justice research could overcome tendencies in the field of data ethics and governance to dwell in subject-centred abstractions about individual privacy, negative liberty, and algorithmic fairness by becoming more responsive to the real-world conditions of power asymmetries, inequality, discrimination, and exploitation that have increasingly come to define the “data-society nexus”. It also meant that globally impacting issues surrounding equitable access to representation through data as well as interests in the just distribution of the benefits of data use and the actualisation of social freedom could be brought to bear in considerations of the social consequences of ubiquitous datafication.