In practices of knowing bodies, biometric data intersects with risk-based logics, perpetuating colonial, racializing legacies (Amoore 2006; Browne 2015; M’Charek et al 2014), whilst data tracking well-being shapes and is shaped by neo-liberal politics (Greenfield 2016; Lupton 2013; Nafus and Sherman 2014). In the machinery of the state, populations and citizens are being digitally re- articulated into novel configurations of domination and resistance (Ruppert 2012; Lyon 2008).

This workshop asks what anthropologists are bringing to, and taking from, the “data moment”, arguing that anthropology has more to offer this moment than just ethnographic methodology. As with the new reproductive technologies 1990s, ‘data’ has put many key anthropological terms in the public spotlight. Over the last decade, a significant body of cross-disciplinary literature on data has emerged, which repeatedly points to the role of data in re-animating and re-shaping many of the traditional objects of anthropological interest.

Anthropologists need to work more closely with data ethnographically. Data is rarely itself the main focus of anthropological research, in part because its very ubiquity makes it difficult to grasp: data is becoming background before it has ever been figured. This workshop will ‘figure’ data by grappling with its lived instantiations.

Data justice has become a mobilising concept. We convene this workshop to develop a distinctively anthropological approach to the politics of data and, through this, to data justice. Taking data as an ethnographic object, social project, and site of cultural values, the workshop will address two main areas: the contested political spaces that have been opened up by data and the relationship between data and place.

The world is talking ‘data’. The early hype around the potential of "Big" data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way to dystopian visions of rampant commodification, the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, bodily alienation, and shadowy data doubles. In response, critical voices are drawing on tropes familiar to anthropologists to find positions of critique: contextualization, community, sovereignty, power.