2019 > About
About
Find out about the 2019 Data Power conference in Bremen, Germany by watching this video:
We live in times in which we experience increasing insecurities on a global, national and local level. Despite the promises of an ever more connected world through digital platforms and infrastructures, conflict zones are spreading, displacing millions of people that feel forgotten and disregarded by the rest of the world. Despite ever more and concrete data about the causes and consequences of climate change, policy actions have become less reliable and political will less convincing. New technologies for analytics promise a world in which practices become more personalised, yet the social world experiences newly formed inequalities, increasing different actors’ insecurity. The idea of openness in forms of, for example, open government or open science is spreading globally and promising increased transparency, accountability and participation, yet we see an unequal distribution of data owners, published data sets and civil society actors that actually engage with such data.
With increasingly globalized digital infrastructures and a global digital political economy, we face new concentrations of power, leading to new inequalities and insecurities with respect to data ownership, data geographies and different forms of data-related practices. It is not only a concentration of power by a few corporations, but also a concentration of the availability of data on individual regions of the world. This includes (exerting) power about data (infra)structures and processes of data creation, data collection, data access, data processing, data interpretation, data storing, data visualisations. The Data Power 2019 conference attends to questions around these phenomena, asking: How does data power further or contest global in/securities? How are global in/securities constructed through or against data? How do civil society actors, government, people engage with societal and individual in/securities through and with data? What are appropriate ontologies to think about data and persons? How may we envisage a just data society? This conference creates a space to reflect on these and other critical issues relating to data’s in/security.
The Data Power 2019 conference attends to questions around these phenomena, asking: How does data power further or contest global in/securities? How are global in/securities constructed through or against data? How do civil society actors, government, people engage with societal and individual in/securities through and with data? What are appropriate ontologies to think about data and persons? How may we envisage a just data society? This conference creates a space to reflect on these and other critical issues relating to data’s in/security.