Critical Connections: Datafication and Community Activism 2024 | by Roderic Crooks | Jun, 2024 | Medium

Datafication names both contemporary forms of technological change — the increasing mediation of life by data-intensive computation — and an ideological belief in the representational capacities of data that make such change seem inevitable, beneficial, or even pleasurable (van Dijck, 2014; Kennedy & Hill, 2018). The work of community organizers complicates this progressive aura of datafication by connecting seemingly novel technologies to longer histories of state violence and grassroots resistance (Olojo, 2024). Community organizers and other overtly political actors based in communities of color have long engaged with various forms of data aggregation, analysis, and visualization in pursuit of social movement-aligned goals, often by using data for storytelling, community education, and confrontation with elected officials and agencies (Crooks 2024). Organizers dispute, correct, refuse, and annotate official data used to describe their communities and the people who live in them; at

Datafication names both contemporary forms of technological change — the increasing mediation of life by data-intensive computation — and an ideological belief in the representational capacities of data that make such change seem inevitable, beneficial, or even pleasurable (van Dijck, 2014; Kennedy & Hill, 2018). The work of community organizers complicates this progressive aura of datafication by connecting seemingly novel technologies to longer histories of state violence and grassroots resistance (Olojo, 2024). Community organizers and other overtly political actors based in communities of