Data Justice in Practice: A Guide for Policymakers

The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice project aims to broaden understanding of the social, historical, cultural, political, and economic forces that contribute to discrimination and inequity in contemporary ecologies of data collection, governance, and use. In this guide for policymakers, we offer practical guidance to support policymaking where such work concerns data, digital infrastructures, and affected areas of civic, public, and private life. As discussed in our Integrated Literature Review and Annotated Bibliography, the nascent field of data justice has, in its brief existence, done important work to illuminate how historically rooted conditions of power asymmetry, inequality, discrimination, and exploitation are drawn into processes of data production, extraction, and use. The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice project offers conceptual framing and guidance to expand this area of scholarship and practice.