Techniques and technologies of counting have roots in colonial practices that aimed to ‘see’ populations in specific ways. Such acts of “seeing” were never merely descriptive, whether undertaken by colonial states or markets (Scott 1998; MacKenzie 2008; Fourcade and Healy 2017). Rather, they actively shaped how populations were governed and valued. Even as data-driven technologies and their processing capacities have evolved, these histories continue to shape how states, markets, civil society, and communities perceive citizens, workers, consumers, and themselves (Sriraman 2018; Eubanks 2017; Noble 2018). Be it national citizenship registries, Covid-19 dashboards, targeted advertising, or productivity metrics, these contemporary projects are deemed apolitical and neutral tools for impartial investigations and ‘evidence-based’ governance. Crucially, this framing treats counting as descriptive rather than constitutive, obscuring the logics (and politics) through which certain realities are made to count over others. 

Against this backdrop, this panel invites critical explorations of contemporary modes of (ac)counting with and beyond data. Here, we understand counting as encompassing the norms and practices of enumeration through which our worlds are made to count and data, as encompassing not only datasets and metrics but also qualitative accounts, records, proxies, and other material–discursive forms. Moving beyond dominant framings of counting as problems of surveillance and control, we problematise counting as world-making (Verran 2001) — what ways of being and becoming are counted and accounted for? How are contemporary data-driven technologies implicated in these processes, co-producing these realities?  We invite contributions, including empirical studies, theoretical and methodological reflections that explore themes including: How are data-driven practices and methods deployed to enumerate various spheres of everyday life? What actors, institutions, and relations are caught within and shaped by contemporary modes of counting? What specific counts are produced, normalised, or overlooked by these practices? And how do they (re)make the worlds they enumerate? 

Please share the call with students and colleagues who may be interested in the themes of this panel.