Knowledge is power and the information behind it must be liberated. Today, more than ever, data has become an important stake in social struggles and the tightening of control over it has not gone without resistance. Social activists around the world are engaging with data in novel ways, whether through investigating tax havens, tracking police misconduct, confronting employers with evidence of wage theft, mapping evictions across the cityscape, or charting the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples of their lands. Social movement groups, labour unions, and community organizations are developing and applying new kinds of technology and programming skills to collect and analyze data in ways that go beyond traditional information access. Drawing on interviews with more than fifty data activists around the world, Mobilizing Data for Justice provides the inspiration that activists need for social justice struggles today.
The Data Justice Hub is a collaborative research project that focuses on skills development for social activists. Mobilizing Data for Justice is the primer that data activists need for social justice struggles today.
"Mobilizing Data for Justice is both a guide and a provocation. It offers a clear and practical map for understanding how communities wrest data and its meanings from hegemonic power, while providing rare insight into the strategies, tensions, and everyday practices that make data mobilization possible-all along insisting that care, community, and shared responsibility are not add-ons but foundations of data activism."
"In a time of mass surveillance alongside psyops and misinformation campaigns, all in the service of techno oligarchs and their patrons, Mobilizing Data for Justice provides an incredible range of strategies and tactics to fight for control over the digital technology that shapes our lives. From struggles for data access to campaign mobilizing, this book provides key tools and ideas for activists and advocates to contest those who use digital environments as venues for maintaining massive inequalities and social controls."
"Mobilizing Data for Justice is an indispensable contribution to 'movement-relevant' theory. Drawing on extensive collaborations with global activists and guided by institutional ethnography and participatory action research, the volume translates lived experience into useful knowledge and actionable insights. This book is an essential resource for scholars, practitioners, and organizers committed to mobilizing data ethically and effectively for social change."
"Mobilizing Data for Justice is a powerful book that will support students, activists, practitioners, and teachers in their quest towards social justice. Each chapter in the book represents a great introduction to better understand data activism, surveillance and sousveillance, data and archiving, and data justice. If you want to strengthen your intellectual and practical digital self-defence, this book is a must!"
"Mobilizing Data for Justice pairs practical guidance with an incredible range of grounded examples, offering a resource that empowers rather than overwhelms. Collective engagement with this book will strengthen shared capacity for transformative social change in an increasingly data-driven world."
"A treasure trove. Practical and inspiring, it brings together the critical ways that activists use data to defend movements, build new methods of documentation, and challenge rising surveillance and authoritarianism."
"Mobilizing Data for Justice is a timely and valuable resource that offers guidelines for employing digital tools along with more conventional media in order to advance grassroots and community-based struggles for social justice and progressive agendas. This book is a critical resource dedicated to new forms of action and solidarities in the work towards a more equitable, democratic, and earth- and people-friendly world."
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