Democratizing Data: Grassroots Strategies to Advance Human Rights (Bernstein Institute Annual Conference)

Seen as essential to understanding human life, data informs and shapes knowledge creation. It is powerful, political, and for generations has been a tool of oppression, generated and harvested by corporations, colonial regimes, and democracies alike to exploit the poor and marginalized. The ability to define individuals and communities has remained in the pockets of the powerful, with marginalized communities excluded from the design, collection, and analysis of the data that represents their lived realities. As the process of datafication – the rendering our lives subject to computation and algorithm – has grown, the divide between those with the power to define and calculate and those subject to such processes has become ever more important.