About
Critical Data in Critical Times
Call for Papers Data Power 2027
4-6th October 2027. Guadalajara (Mexico), Hannover (Germany) and online
Language: English and Spanish
Critical times challenge society to its core. They raise questions and tensions around who belongs to the society and which values will shape its future trajectories. Experiences of crises compel us to revisit past and present practices and to imagine alternative future societies we want to live in. Despite global dependence on Big Tech infrastructures leaving little leeway for alternative data practices and meanings, digital data have become indispensable for navigating the uncertainty of critical times. Today, these data come under threat, e.g. of loss or discontinuation of recording. At the same time, decisions about what data are kept, deleted, made visible, or hidden increasingly shape how crises, conflicts, and everyday forms of distress are experienced and governed. That concerns data about public health, precarious labour, and environmental degradation, as well as governmental and activist records of violence.
Organizations such as truth commissions, governments, universities, alternative media, and civil society groups, all work with digital data to document various forms of harms and social suffering, sometimes not even acknowledged as a societal crisis. These data are crucial to design and manage public policies, to support social movements, to sustain collective memory, and to articulate critical narratives that include testimonies of crisis victims and survivors.
Data Power 2027 invites empirical, methodological, and conceptual engagement with the critical role data play in both provoking and tackling current societal crises, including but not limited to the following questions:
- How can data be preserved when they come under threat, and what alternative data practices, initiatives, and forms of resistance are emerging in critical times?
- How do AI and automated decision-making reshape societally critical data practices and infrastructures and what is the role of infrastructural and data sovereignty in preserving situated local meanings?
- What social tensions arise between remembering and forgetting in digital societies and what does it mean for the contemporary struggles for social justice?
- How can different critical perspectives on data (e.g. human rights, environmental defense, and journalism) be brought together to navigate critical times?
- How can NGOs, alternative media, social movements, and academia create shared spaces for acting upon data for exchanging their unique experiences, conceptual frameworks, and methodological tools?
- How can data about various situations and experiences of crises be analyzed, visualized, and communicated without reproducing the violence they document?
- What ethical protocols are needed when designing visual interfaces, maps, dashboards, archives, or narrative platforms based on sensitive data?
We also invite interdisciplinary contributions on cross-cutting topics including issues of data power, in/equalities and in/justices, methodological reflections, participatory research, and reflections on academic knowledge production in critical times.
We welcome contributions in different formats in English or Spanish:
- Individual paper presentations
- Closed panels of max. 5 papers
- Workshops and Making & Doing sessions
- Art-based presentations
- Collaborative formats with field experts
If you have questions or ideas for further presentation formats, please get in touch.
The Data Power 2027 conference will take place in Guadalajara (Mexico), Hanover (Germany), and online.
Presenters in Guadalajara will have the option to present in either English or Spanish. Please add both an English and Spanish abstract to the submission form if you wish to present in Spanish.
Submission guidelines
Please submit your abstract (max. 300 words) for individual presentations by 31.01.2027 using this submission form. You will be prompted to specify your preferred location for participation.
Workshops, Making & Doing sessions, arts-based presentations and collaborative formats require a 300 word abstract outlining your proposal and required resources e.g. space, tech, number of participants. These should be submitted by email to datapowerconference@proton.me by 31.01.2027.
Closed panel submissions of max. 5 papers require a panel title, brief abstracts describing the panel (max. 200 words) and each contribution (max. 300 words per paper). Please email closed panel submissions directly to datapowerconference@proton.me by 31.01.2027.
Timeline
- Abstract submission deadline: 31.01.2027
- Decision notification: 28.02.2027
- Conference: 04.-06.10.2027
Data Power 2027 conference team
- Víctor Hugo Ábrego (ITESO)
- Paloma López-Portillo (ITESO)
- Narce Ruiz (Tec de Monterrey)
- Irina Zakharova (Leibniz University Hannover)
- Friederike Bahl (Leibniz University Hannover)
- Yana Boeva (University of Stuttgart)
- Jo Bates (University of Sheffield)
- Juliane Jarke (University of Graz)
- Janaki Srinivasan (University of Oxford)
Any questions, please contact us at: datapowerconference@proton.me.
