Building a global ethnography of practices and infrastructures of datafication in the Global South

Moisés Kopper

What does living, producing and engaging with data feel like?

Have you ever paused to think about how much of our daily lives are governed by the politics of data—by decisions around what counts, who counts, and how to count: things that often escape our sight but deeply shape how we come to think about ourselves and our environments, our political and ethical commitments, and our very existence as citizens?

One of the key things we are witnessing in our present data moment is that data not only constrains, pries and extracts; data also creates new values, brings people together, enables political action and strengthens livelihoods under threat. In the Global South, we know that data has long served political and developmental goals—more than ever, big data and technology are themselves being promoted as tokens of development by governments and multilateral organisations in the fight against poverty and inequality.

What we are witnessing on the ground, however, is that grassroots groups and activists are producing and circulating their own data to promote rights and hold governments accountable. For people who have been left out of official statistics and conventions of power, insurgent data is becoming a medium and a key arena for politics—to counter the multiple forms of exclusion and effacements they have faced historically and daily in their lives.

The link between data and citizenship

We can find one important example in the context of Brazil’s favelas—informal settlements that have been historically shaped by unplanned urbanisation, precarised labour and infrastructural exclusion. While these territories have been traditionally measured against top-down narratives of subnormality and deprivation, recent years have seen an upsurge in favela-based alternative data labs and collectives that seem to question the very knowledge infrastructures upon which data on favelas is based. In the favela complex of Maré, a pioneering initiative led by the NGOs Redes da Maré and the Observatório de Favelas has collected alternative data to the official national population census. The Censo da Maré began in 2010 when favela-based intellectuals mobilised to produce better and more fine-grained territorial and populational data for the 140 000 residents living in the 15 favelas that comprise the district. This initiative has since built a cartographic database of 800 streets and alleyways, mapped over 3 000 business addresses, and conducted household interviews with all residents through a team of 140 favela-based experts and fieldworkers. While their initial objective was to foster citizen engagement with data and intervene in public debates about the access to rights of favela residents via data, the landscape of grassroots initiatives has been expanding steadily, with a multitude of favela-based organisations now encouraging locals to participate in surveys and taking into their hands the task of producing alternative forms of quantification that relish the power of numbers to change their terms of representation.

Just as grassroots experts engage in a movement to repurpose official counting infrastructures to quantify the experiences of marginalised citizens, national statistics experts have been restructuring their data collection protocols in efforts to listen to the demands of organised groups, thereby improving the design of their population census and the legitimacy of official numbers. For example, in 2023, Brazil’s National Statistics Office concluded one of its longest census taking in recent history. The operation was hindered by a lack of funding, scarcity of enumerators and growing societal distrust in official statistics, which, combined with the effects of the pandemic, far-right politics and fiscal cutdowns, led to several postponements and legal debacles about the place and status of public statistics in today’s divided Brazilian society. To counter these problems, official planners partnered with civil society organisations in attempts to improve their coverage in informal neighbourhoods all over the country. Local communities were involved in training and data collection activities just as the institute relied on existing informal networks and local enumerators to bridge the increasing gap between the official representations produced by population censuses and the needs, realities and alternative epistemologies of marginalised communities.

These two entry points—one top-down, another bottom-up—into the politics of everyday datafication at the Brazilian favelas evince the central role that data practices and knowledge infrastructures have come to play in shaping governance in modern societies. Engaging with new forms of producing and circulating numbers fundamentally redraws the link between data and citizenship, prompting questions about how people on the ground see and negotiate their sociocultural and political-economic belonging from the margins.

At the same time, these examples show how numbers and belonging come together in empirically situated settings and through exchange, borrowing and re-appropriation practices. On the one hand, top-down official statistics are seeing their numbers and institutional frameworks being called into question daily by an unparalleled combination of widespread distrust in science and a crisis of representation. On the other hand, new grassroots strategies are emerging to contest the state’s monopoly on producing public statistics by devising their own tools and numbers to make inequalities visible and hold governments accountable. Crucially, the interoperability across these scales makes them such powerful examples of the empirical complexities of informational citizenship.

An ethnographic theory of numbers in the making

With so much attention to the enfranchising potential of data, we know surprisingly little about the everyday realities of those making and circulating their own numbers. Debates around data tend to polarise quickly: data is either good or bad; numbers are either tools of domination or recognition.

InfoCitizen moves beyond superficial dualisms by devising an ethnographic theory of informational citizenship that captures real-life interactions between top-down and bottom-up data initiatives involving both citizens and experts in the Global South. It sheds light on this new form of social membership that emerges from the ground up as people negotiate their terms of inclusion via the production, circulation and contestation of data. In InfoCitizen, we aim to produce more granular and interlinked accounts of how, why and when people engage with numbers to grasp their impacts on identity, subjectivity and public policy.

Such ethnographic theory involves a three-pronged strategy. First, we move from datafication to data ecosystems. Critical data scholars refer to datafication as the practice of translation whereby digital, quantifiable data is crafted. They speak of extraction and tabulation processes and the creation of (economic) value under surveillance capitalism from the reorganisation of social life into a recordable, analysable and quantifiable medium. We flip this assertion by identifying datafication as a multidimensional process that encompasses the tools and the experiences of making, spreading and living with numbers as a means to exercise social membership, create identity and act on the future. We are interested in the data ecosystems enabled by datafication: the assemblages of infrastructures, organisations, politics and knowledge whereby data gains consistency and creates value for disadvantaged communities.

Secondly, we move from data politics to data poetics. Science and technology scholars typically define data politics as entailing the technical and political dimensions of making and circulating data: the idea that data bears political undertones because it enacts populations as intelligible objects of government. By contrast, we argue that to understand the multidimensional effects of data on populations, we need to go beyond the politics of data. Archival research on official sources and interviews with experts are important, but they are not enough. We must also capture the poetics of data by looking at how experts and citizens remake their identities through the lens of data. We want to see what happens to the data and the people who mobilise them beyond the technopolitical arenas of their production. We ask: what does living, producing, and engaging with data feel like for the marginalised communities who are now turning to the promises of data to improve their well-being?

The third theoretical move entails re-qualifying what is meant by the term ‘Global South.’ We do not see it as a geographically marginal and self-contained region but as an epistemological nexus with shared histories of exploitation, inequality and invisibility. We draw on the work of post-colonial urbanists to think of the periphery as theory and thus as embodied, affectively charged realities. Our effort is to understand how post-colonial legacies of extraction and invisibility set the stage for the experiences and practices of datafication that we see taking shape today in the Global South.

Our team brings together different perspectives from the social sciences and the digital humanities to find answers to these and other questions and, in the process, change the terms of the debate on the human and technological consequences of datafication. We are a vibrant team of young scholars interested in exploring how these issues make and remake life for favela-based activists in Brazil, ethnic minorities in Portugal, the African diaspora in Germany, and engaged communities in Tanzania and Kenya.

And we build on an applied network that connects activists, citizens and practitioners across the fieldsites to reimagine subjectivity, community, law- and policy-making in the era of digital development.

Together, we move beyond technical understandings of data and find new ways to narrate and visualise the politics and the poetics of data—by capturing the experiences, routines and publics forming around data ecosystems in the Global South.

PROJECT SUMMARY

InfoCitizen explores how new forms of datafication change citizenship practices in the Global South by charting grassroots and institutional data efforts and their impact on identity, citizenship and policy in Brazil, Portugal, Germany, Tanzania and Kenya. Combining archival research, digital humanities, audiovisual techniques and mixed methods, InfoCitizen examines how top-down and bottom- up data ecosystems come together to redefine the sociocultural and political-economic citizenship of marginalised populations. We connect practitioners, stakeholders, experts, and citizens by producing insights and tools to visualise data’s role in democratic transformation and citizenship dynamics today.

PROJECT PARTNERS

InfoCitizen engages in global partnerships to enhance local data representation and community voices. Collaborations include Africa’s Voices Foundation in Africa and Afrozensus in Germany; and the NGO Redes da Maré, GENI (the Group for the Study of New Illegalisms at Fluminense Federal University), and IESP-UERJ (Institute for Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro) in Brazil. Each partner contributes to advancing inclusive, community-focused data initiatives and supporting InfoCitizen’s mission to empower diverse populations.

PROJECT LEAD PROFILE

Kopper is a Research Professor at the University of Antwerp and Associate Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. He is the author of Architectures of Hope and co-editor of Subjectivity at Latin America’s Urban Margins. He held postdoctoral appointments at the Free University of Brussels, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and the University of São Paulo with grants from the ERC, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the São Paulo Research Foundation. He is interested in informal markets; class mobility; material hope; the politics of datafication, inequality and expertise; statecraft and societal resilience.