177. Infrastructures and affective orientations of data
Bryan Truitt, University of California Irvine; Andrew Hamann, University of California irvine;
While the dominant rhetoric of data implies an intimacy with visuality, we are interested in alternative epistemologies which center senses and affect, and are attuned to what Raymond Williams theorizes as the multiplicity of overlapping 'structure of feelings' which constitute any particular moment. Ruth Wilson Gilmore extends William's concept into an infrastructure of feeling to describe the Black Radical Tradition's iterative process of reselecting and remembering liberatory thinkers produces an infrastructure oriented towards freedom. For Gilmore, these affective orientations produce liberatory material conditions. Following a growing body of research in critical data studies which interrogates data's affective registers, we encourage papers that examine the (im)possibility for data to produce liberatory material conditions, exploring the affective attachments and desires that motivate the data practices and products for social change.
We are interested in interventions at the intersection of space and data, exploring critical geographies and the city to offer critique, alternatives, and grounds for resistance to top-down data practices for imagining and managing today's cities.
We welcome contributors from a wide range of backgrounds-artists, community organizers, academics, and others to submit essays or reflections.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:
-Professed or repressed desires and affects of data or of the data practitioner;
-Intersections between data and positivism, objectivity, and transparency;
-Citizen science and other minoritarian approaches to rethinking data 'from below' such as, storytelling, forensic aesthetics, counter-mapping;
-Intimacy of data with visuality, and other intersections with the visual, such as surveillance or dataveillance;
-Data refusal or opacities.
Keywords: Social Movements and STS, Data and Quantification, Infrastructure, Affect; carceral geography; surveillance; urban planning; Data visualizations.
