The Social Lives of Data

Catalog description

How can we follow data as it moves through the world? Through ethnographic attention to the making and unmaking of data’s materialities, mobilities and multiplicities, this seminar develops an anthropology of the social lives of data. Working from the assumption that data is not given, static or objective, we attend instead to how they are produced and embedded in social worlds through power, everyday practices, and larger infrastructures. This seminar draws on the theoretical frameworks and methodological tools that anthropology as a discipline offers to situate data within broader histories of knowledge, governance and capital.