Hello all! We wanted to draw your attention to our call for abstracts to the DATA VIOLENCE//DATA SOLIDARITIES workshop to be held at 4S in Seattle in the fall. We are specifically looking for scholarly, creative, and activist work exploring modes of resistance,forms of solidarity, and alternate data configurations in the face of environmental, colonial, political-economic and representational data violence. In addition to a panel featuring short presentations, the second half of this combined format panel will be a Data Solidarities Workshop. Using ideas introduced through the short presentations, we will engage in speculative co-design for a theory and praxis of data solidarities. This panel / abstract is meant to be a generative space, and we welcome questions / proposals / ideas. Please feel free to reach out to us directly - the full call for abstracts is pasted below. Deadline: January 31 Submission link: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php Rebecca Smith, Assistant Professor, Lawrence Technological University Department of Architecture Linda Huber, PhD Candidate, University of Michigan School of Information Full call for abstracts: The emerging representational and environmental violence of generative AI can be understood as only the newest manifestation of decades of data violence. Scholars have shown how datafication reproduces and extends projects of surveillance / militarism (Suchman 2023); colonialism and capitalist extraction of value (Dyer-Witheford et al 2019; Mejias & Couldry 2019); white supremacy and gender essentialism (Scherman et al 2021, Benjamin 2019, Brown 2015). Data violence is enacted at a material-semiotic level, through binaristic modes of computation, abstraction, classification, and decontextualization (Jefferson 2020, Bering-Porter 2022) - and is enabled and amplified through violent legal regimes of private property, carcerality, and financialization. Many techniques and strategies for resistance to data violence are already emerging, including counter-mapping (Maharawal & McElroy 2017), critical visualization (D'Ignazio & Klein 2020), data solidarities and collectivities (Prainsack et al 2017), and speculative design (Dunne & Raby 2013, Kim & DiSalvo 2010). Through this combined format panel, we will continue developing conceptual and practical tools for interrupting data violence. We ask: - What might it look like to pursue ‘data solidarities’, rooted in a praxis of mutualism and interdependence? - How might data solidarities be enacted at the level of semiotics and structure, through new forms and models of data-as-representation? - How can we exploit the collectivized nature of data-value to interrupt current models of private property and ownership? What alternative kinds of claims or rights to data can we explore, rooted in collective responsibility and stewardship? - What tactics can help us to interrupt the political, economic and social infrastructures enabling data violence? We invite submissions from those engaging with these questions in scholarly, activist, and creative registers. This Combined Form Open Panel will be broken into two parts. The first component will feature short presentations which respond to, document, or critically examine enactments of data violence and / or data solidarities. The second component will be a Data Solidarities Workshop, using ideas introduced through the short presentations to engage in speculative co-design for collecting, generative, and developing a theory and praxis for data solidarities. Dyer-Whitheford, Nick, Kjosen, Atle Mikkola, and Steinhoff, James. Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2019. Couldry, Nick ; Mejias, Ulises A. “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject.” Television & New Media. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2019. doi:10.1177/1527476418796632. Scheuerman, Morgan Klaus; Pape, Madeleine; Hanna, Alex. “Auto-Essentialization: Gender in Automated Facial Analysis as Extended Colonial Project.” Big Data & Society. London, England: SAGE Publications, 2021. doi:10.1177/20539517211053712. Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity, 2019. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Jefferson, Brian Jordan. Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. Minneapolis, Minnesota ; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Bering-Porter, David. “Data as Symbolic Form: Datafication and the Imaginary Media of W. E. B. Du Bois.” Critical Inquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. doi:10.1086/717308. D'Ignazio, Catherine and Klein, Lauren F. Data Feminism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020. Maharawal, Manissa M. ; McElroy, Erin. “The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: Counter Mapping and Oral History toward Bay Area Housing Justice.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Washington: Routledge, 2018. doi:10.1080/24694452.2017.1365583. Dunne, Anthony and Raby, Fiona. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013. Kim, Tanyoung, & DiSalvo, Carl. “Speculative Visualization: A New Rhetoric for Communicating Public Concerns” In Design Research Society International Conference of Design & Complexity. 2010. Prainsack, Barbara ; El-Sayed, Seliem ; Forgó, Nikolaus ; Szoszkiewicz, Łukasz ; Baumer, Philipp. “Data Solidarity: A Blueprint for Governing Health Futures.” The Lancet. Digital Health, 2022. doi:10.1016/S2589-7500(22)00189-3. -- *Linda Huber, she/her* *PhD Candidate, University of Michigan School of Information <https://www.si.umich.edu/about-umsi>* *+1 773 575 7783*