School of Data and Shifting Forms of Political Subjectivity

Abstract

Digital media are increasingly ‘data media’ and data media are involved in various forms of political activism. This chapter reconstructs political subjectivities around figurations of the ‘digital citizen’ within the field of (open) data activism. The authors draw on interviews, document analysis and concepts from modern and post-sovereign political theories of subjectivation to explore the transformative educational work of the Datenschule (School of Data) project, focusing on the intersection between open data and anti-discriminatory activism. The chapter suggests that although School of Data explicitly positions its work as supporting ‘skills’ acquisition (data literacy), indicating a modernist understanding of subjectivity, the project also generates an understanding of political subjectivation as a multiplicity of distributed transformative processes, entangling data literacy with power structures, data-related and organisational practices.