Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data Universalism

By Stefania Milan, Emiliano Treré. Television & New Media, 2019

379 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an epistemological, ontological, and ethical program and outlines five conceptual operations to shape this agenda. First, it suggests moving past the “universalism” associated with our interpretations of datafication. Second, it advocates understanding the South as a composite and plural entity, beyond the geographical connotation (i.e., “global South”). Third, it postulates a critical engagement with the decolonial approach. Fourth, it argues for the need to bring agency to the core of our analyses. Finally, it suggests embracing the imaginaries of datafication emerging from the Souths, foregrounding empowering ways of thinking data from the margins.

Subfields: Genetics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/370db1355cc605b6c36f6f8f1b0d8f53db9b4466

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Citations in the corpus

Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence (2020, background): “In the case of racial capitalism, similarly to Ricaurte (2019), Couldry and Mejias (2019a) and Milan and Treré (2019),we propose that institutionalised harms replicated by automated decision-making tools should be understood as continuous to, and inextricably linked with, “histories of racist…”
What We Can't Measure, We Can't Understand: Challenges to Demographic Data Procurement in the Pursuit of Fairness (2020, background): “Similar to this work, important contributions emerging from various academic fields and activist communities on the issue of justice in data use interrogate when and where it is acceptable to collect what types of data and what degree of control data subjects should have over their data thereafter [”
The decolonial turn in data and technology research: what is at stake and where is it heading? (2021, background): “In the introduction to their special issue, Milan and Treré (2019) argue that critical approaches to data ﬁ cation must re ﬂ ect the diversity of the geographical, political and social contexts captured by the umbrella term ‘ Global South ’ .”