Making our House of Difference a Home

Admittedly, I was present for very little of the workshop. I was also absent from much of its organisation. These thoughts, therefore, do not benefit from a full, real-time (rather than hastily-read, retrospective) understanding of its aims. 

I will speak, very decidedly, from an emotional place. I found my brief engagement with the workshop to be uncomfortable – not the productive discomfort that pushes needles and confronts power, but a soft, disquieting one that made me question the extent to which we were really exploring data justice. I still cannot pinpoint the source of this discomfort, which grew from a dull, amorphous presence into something with a distinctly cloying and crablike existence, but I have three observations, within the heart of which I believe the source of this abjection is situated.

The first is identity. It is important for marginalised and underrepresented scholars to make visible the injustices that comprise, undergird, and constitute knowledge production. From our precarious, rickety seats within the ivory tower, it is necessary – with all the labour, burden, and risks involved – for us to scamper to its belfry and ring truth out. Yet, I felt much of the conversations being led by the identities that brought us here, in this belfry, each clamouring to reach our hands further up the bellpull than the other. We spoke (and were expected to speak) from places of blackness, queerness; we spoke (to a lesser extent, curiously) on behalf of the Indigenous peoples some of us work with.

As we launched not into back-and-forth dialogue but extended monologues, rants, and diatribes (I being just as guilty if not more than most), I sensed how emboldened we were by identity in determining what did and did not constitute data justice. These oppression-reinforced claims came not as a form of illumination but as a mechanism of legitimation, almost as if we, members of an inherently violent system of academia (given its vast wealth, paywalls, and commodification of data), felt it the only way we could reconcile our positions. It reminded me of the Audre Lorde quote – except we had made that house of difference a home, a fully-refurbished, and sprawling mansion sitting high above a neighbourhood of contemporaries. Perhaps it was different after day two, and perhaps the sense of artificial moral superiority is mine alone to contend with.  

The second is around our attempts to define data, justice, and data justice. In our attempts to explode what is meant by data, taking into consideration the many ways of knowing, communicating, and understanding that exists and is often excluded by academic pursuits, and refining what is meant by justice, trying to hold to account the processes, procedures, institutions, and practices that have enshrined the violent, extractive, dismissive, and colonial relations and workings into our epistemologies, methodologies, and outputs, we shuffled around current discourse and sought to adopt new lenses and framings.

Yet, as we danced between explosions and refinements, I could not help but notice the extent to which the steps we took were scarcely different from the waltz that exists. As we zoomed out and in, danced and provoked, it felt as though we were stuck on the same tune, on the same floor beneath the same ceiling, looking approvingly at each other through the same gilded lenses.

The final observation, which unnerved me most, was the very nature of the setup within which we attempted to produce, distil, recognise, approximate, understand, ruminate on (or whatever it was we attempted to do around) data justice. The workshop, being the output of a Wenner-Gren grant, had to take a recognisable form, had to perform particular functions, and speak to particular logics. Trapped inside this data prison, we all attempted to envision a data utopia… I have to be honest, I don’t really know exactly what we expected to, or in fact did, see.