400018 SE Creating versions of the world through science and technology (2021W)

Data enacts that which it represents. It brings into being objects and subjects through gathering, classifying, storing, retrieving and analysing data as well as chosing specific representational practices. This also means to be attentive to the social and political struggles which are often hidden behind the dense speaking about data as if it would simply represent these subjects and objects independently. Indeed, over the past years the very meanings and practices of research data and the ways in which they are collected and used have undergone considerable shifts. Digitization and datafication shape and transform not only our research practices but also the subjects/the questions we are researching. It transforms how we value, assess and justify what we (can) know and how we know. This includes a reflection of the data work that has become part of academic research, but also how we structure and care for our data. In short, in this seminar we want to engage with a specific version of what Ruppert and co-authors (2017) have called data politics, i.e. how political questions in relation to scientific and technological developments get articulated through data and how data in turn create governance effects. The seminar invites through reading key texts and reflecting the different PhD projects, to engage with the ways in which data and related practices are become a matter of concern within the own project and beyond. This means exploring the conditions of the possible (to what data do we get access, who gets voice through specific sets of data, what is made invisible through data choices, onership of data) as well as the kinds of choices that are involved, which both lead, in the end, to the creation of a specific vision of the world and no other. The seminar aims to specifically address students who work on topics related to science and technology, as in these cases data (practices) are a key constitutive element of the study objects, while researchers are simultaneously asked to produce data on field-specific and situated data practices.