2023/06/01 by Lucy Pei, Roderic Crooks · 1 voice
Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Census and Population Estimation #Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies #Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1353/cj.2023.a904636
Grassroots Data Activism Lucy Pei (bio) and Roderic Crooks (bio) M, a professional community organizer in the midwestern United States who works with undocumented youth, talks us through a typical day at work. Her role focuses on the creation, aggregation, and analysis of data using a commercial platform called EveryAction, but she chafes at questions about the procedures, formats, or outputs of data work. Our research team asks a series of questions that prompt respondents such as M to describe the qualities of the data they work with and what they do with it—questions we have used to study other kinds of data professionals, at city offices and in public school districts. After several prodding questions that turn again and again to the particulars of data in her work, M finally tells our interviewers bluntly, "What I've learned from many years, now at this point over ten years of organizing, mostly around immigrant rights, is that yes, maybe numbers and facts do cause a shock factor. But people are motivated and persuaded to change because of their feelings and how they feel about something. And you can use that data to help them feel in a particular way, but that's where the storytelling comes in."1 The ongoing public crises of the 2020s illustrate the accelerating datafication of contemporary government bodies at all levels. Public life is increasingly organized around engagements with data, especially data in visual form.2 Dashboards produced by national, county, state, and city bureaucracies displayed the grim, unrelenting number of COVID-19 deaths nation-wide, [End Page 188] but they also provided quick readouts of laws restricting movement (or restoring it), local hospital capacity, or color-coded masking rules. If, as Michele Murphy writes, dashboards are phantasmagrams, graphical objects charged with affective power, then visual artifacts produced by the state in all of their various instantiations are likewise inhabited by some palpable affective charge in excess of the dry quantitative practices for which they stand as proxy.3 It is this excess that grassroots organizers like M are after: a way to evoke feeling, inspire action, and ultimately build power in the communities in which they work. In particular, the way community organizers in working-class communities of color in the United States use data and data visualization shows us that critical information study and media study are happening outside the bureaucratic halls of the state and out of the purview of our academic disciplines. M's caution demands that when we consider political uses of data—including those oppositional or activist projects that seek to build grassroots power through community organizing—we take more seriously the role of narrative, particularly of public narrative. Public narratives are central to certain strains of contemporary community organizing. These public narratives are organizing tools that express a coherent worldview and articulate an actionable map of power: who has it, who needs it, and how it can be gained. Public narratives link individual, community, and action by illustrating why the individual is called to act, why others must join in that action, and why such action must be immediate.4 Community organizing is a technique and philosophy of political action, but it is also, increasingly, a job—one undertaken by skilled and educated workers dedicated to movement goals and employed by overtly political organizations, including many not-for-profit organizations in the public sector. As community organizers train, they practice creating public narratives: personal and compelling stories that inspire the listener to see a problem, to invest emotionally in the redress of that problem, and to join collective actions. Like so many other forms of work, community organizing has become datafied, executed via the commercial tools and platforms used for all kinds of professional work. But for community organizers, data work is not just about data: it is a multifaceted form of knowledge production and, simultaneously, a strategy aimed at changing the world, largely through crafting public narratives that will motivate others to action. In our research with community organizers based in working-class communities of color, we have found that much of the day-in and day-out work of grassroots organizing involves reusing, recontextualizing, or...