This special issue calls for provocative, cutting-edge, and interdisciplinary scholarly contributions that theorize, examine and advance how ideas, including but not limited to, data feminism, data justice, and data colonialism might be refined or reimagined to enable people to resist state/corporate surveillance and propose new avenues of resistance. In doing so, this issue provides a much-needed update to the 2009 special issue of Surveillance & Society that explored various forms of resistance to state and corporate surveillance (Fernandez and Huey 2009; Martin et al. 2009). With its focus on exploring data visibility and data invisibility (Taylor 2017), this issue is guided by the following questions: 1) How might ideas of data feminism, data justice, and data colonialism be employed to enable specific groups to achieve greater visibility to governments so that they may access rights, services, and justice? 2) Conversely, how might these ideas enable people to create or increase data invisibility from governments or companies to counter discrimination and bias arising from surveillance?
Global patterns of data extraction and commodification related to state/corporate surveillance practices are generating a countervailing interest amongst some national governments and citizens in asserting control over their data locally. Vital work in this area focuses on reconceptualizing or strengthening human rights or developing alternative forms of rights. These include collective or group conceptions of privacy to complement individual-based legal frameworks (see Taylor et al 2017) and data-feminist approaches (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020). Data-justice initiatives posit that people should have the right to choose the nature of their engagement in the data economy and be allowed to opt out of data markets, thereby disrupting corporate preferences for all-encompassing surveillance (e.g., Taylor 2017; Dencik and Sanchez-Monedero 2022). Common too are proposals to share the economic and social benefits of data, such as data trusts (Delacroix and Lawrence 2019). Underlying some of these frameworks is that data should be treated as a social good rather than commercial asset (Daly et al. 2019). Data colonialism, meanwhile, usefully situates contemporary data extraction practices as a continuation of colonialist extraction of natural resources (Couldry and Mejias 2018), a recognition that data capture in the Global South is entangled in a long colonial history (Mumford 2021). Other scholars take a regulatory approach, arguing for limitations on the data market, such as restrictions on the data broker industry (Beer 2018) or the prohibition of harmful surveillance practices, such as biometric data capture like facial recognition software (Stark and Hutson 2021).
This special issue’s focus on creatively re-imagining how ideas, including but not limited to, of data feminism, data justice and data colonialism responds to the ubiquity of state and corporate surveillance systems in every aspect of daily life, a phenomenon captured in what scholars alternatively term “data capitalism” (West 2019) or “surveillance capitalism” (Foster and McChesney 2014; Zuboff 2015). Common to these concepts is the identification of a massive expansion of surveillance systems in both authoritarian and democratic countries and broadening of data collection practices, by both governments and private companies. States, for example, not only employ speculative, future-oriented, data-driven surveillance to monitor suspect populations (Topak, Mekouar and Cavatorta 2022), but also employ data-driven automated decision-making programs to determine people’s eligibility for and manage health, immigration and social assistance programs (Bielefeld et al. 2021). Companies, meanwhile, extract and commodify personal data for a variety of purposes, such as to profile individuals or groups (Taylor et al. 2017) or minutely monitor employees within their workplaces (Levy 2023). The data economy is deeply inequitable, with power asymmetries between the powerful companies and governments capable of extracting data insights and ordinary people whose personal data is exploited, often without their knowledge (Andrejevic and Burdon 2015). This issue’s emphasis upon surveillance-resistance strategies through the lens of data feminism, justice and colonialism is intended to help people counter the data economy’s informational and power asymmetries.
Building upon the critical theories of data feminism, data justice, and data colonialism, amongst others, this special issue invites contributors to reflect critically and creatively on the ideas of data visibility and data invisibility (Taylor 2017). Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:
- How might people disengage from data markets and/or work to correct, erase, or disrupt state or corporate datasets, such as the right to opt-out of discriminatory profiling programs?
- What surveillance practices might enable certain populations to gain greater visibility to governments with the intention of enabling equity-seeking groups to access rights, services, and justice?
- What resistance strategies may be undertaken to enable greater invisibility from state/corporate surveillance practices?
- What creative sabotage might enable people to resist or disrupt governmental or corporate surveillance programs?
- How might “data capitalism” be reformed or destabilized, such as by restricting the monetization of certain types of data?
- How might social movements offer new or radical resistance to datafication practices by governments or corporations?
- What collective practices might be designed to fairly share data’s social and economic benefits amongst the public?
- How might community-led data collection practices help counter the informational and power asymmetries inherent in state and/or corporate surveillance practices?
- What are the limits of individual- or community-based resistance to state and/or corporate surveillance practices?
