The entanglement of data and power makes feminism a necessity for this growing field.
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Data Feminism
Excerpted from
Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. Reprinted with Permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2020.
The act of collecting and recording data about people is not new at all. From the registers of the dead that were published by church officials in the early modern era to the counts of Indigenous populations that appeared in colonial accounts of the Americas, data collection has long been employed as a technique of consolidating knowledge about the people whose data are collected, and therefore consolidating power over their lives. The close relationship between data and power is perhaps most clearly visible in the historical arc that begins with the logs of people captured and placed aboard slave ships, reducing richly lived lives to numbers and names. It passes through the eugenics movement, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which sought to employ data to quantify the superiority of white people over all others. It continues today in the proliferation of biometrics technologies that, as sociologist Simone Browne has shown, are disproportionately deployed to surveil Black bodies.