DATA JUSTICE IN ACADEMIA

Academia is built on interlinking informational systems of power and hierarchy, across many scales, which rarely are addressed in our own academic work. The paywalls research is held within; the languages that articles are published in or conferences are held in;  what gets published and what doesn't and the opaque way journals operate; uneven access to libraries, databases or other resources; how data is extracted from research participants and fieldsites and what happens to that data - these are all issues which academics need to address. Data justice is therefore an important part of the conversation around challenging academic imperialism. We align this project with other efforts to address data justice but here want to provide resources for people who are dealing with these issues as they relate to academia.

We are interested in generating a series of conversations around these issues, broadly framed as data justice, but talking to the ways that knowledge, information and data shape academic work and practice.

If you want to suggest a conversation, then get in touch! Tone - tone.walford@ucl.ac.uk

  • We want to have a conversation about ACCESS.

    Whilst supportive of it in principle, we resist the unreflective turn to open access as the only form of equitable access to data. There are lots of instances in which there need to be restrictions on the way data and information travel, who gets to see it and why, or there needs to be more acknowledgement of the labour and work that went into its production. Imagining data as alienable, inherently mobile and 'free' also risks eclipsing the often appropriative context of its collection. At the same time, there are other instances where information and data should be able to travel and cannot. We want to help produce more nuanced conversations around access.

    Speaking of access … to see our successful Wenner Gren workshop funding application, please email Tone - tone.walford at ucl dot ac dot uk

  • We want to have a conversation about LANGUAGE.

    Language imperialism is a crucial context for data justice in academia. As the emphasis on peer-reviewed journal articles has grown for recognition in many disciplines, and a small number of journals and publishers based in the English-speaking Global North have come to dominate publication pathways for researchers, many scholars in the Global South have come under increasing pressure from their colleagues and institutions to translate their work into English. Simultaneously, open access initiatives within mainstream publishing and decolonizing initiatives within institutionalized teaching have paid little attention to language. With this, already entrenched linguistic and academic hierarchies both within Global South universities and between English-speaking and non-English-speaking researchers, not to mention between researchers and those they write about, have been heightened, and have also become clearly individualized and monetized as the onus for access, translation and linguistic dexterity ultimately lies with the researcher. In this conversation, we want to interrogate this situation: how institutional structures perpetuate this problem; what happens when translated works become de-contextualized and cannibalized in English-speaking countries; and how this has increased exclusion as well as new pathways for academic production away from the English language. The conversation will also be a space for exploring the conflicts and tensions that constitute translation as a political act, both emancipatory and appropriative or extractive.

    This conversation is a collaboration with Dr Julia Sauma