Data Justice Lab conference at Cardiff University and online

Data justice has continued to gain traction as a useful framework for engaging with the implications of the growing emphasis on datafication across social and public life. Yet we still struggle with understanding the impacts and ramifications of the rapid turn to data infrastructures on the ground and how people are responding. We are too often limited by speculation or a focus on particular technologies that lack insights from lived experiences. Moreover, when impact and responses are discussed, they are often centred on the individual dimension over the collective one, even as these technologies come to shape and shift the make-up and meaning of communities and groups– and thereby politics. What, then, shall we make of collective experiences in the datafied society? In what ways are people and communities impacted by the growing use of data in society, and what are their responses? How do we study and conceptualise this effectively? What are alternative ways of thinking and organising datafication? And what are the implications for data justice? This two-day conference will explore impacts, lived experiences and forms of resistance in relation to datafication. Hosted by the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC) in the UK, it will bring together international scholars, practitioners, activists, and community groups to discuss the meaning and practice of social justice and collective experiences in a datafied society.