Introduction: Number Politics after Datafication

Abstract

For decades now, scholars of quantification have been exposing the rationalist and modernist operations that lend numbers their political qualities. Yet recent anthropological scholarship has begun to show how data’s ontological plasticity and messiness are constitutive of alternative political fields. This introduction brings these two streams of literature into productive conversation to rethink the means and meanings of number politics after datafication. We move beyond extant concerns about the governing and stabilising powers of numbers to highlight the moral and affective and the collective and subjective practices out of which data’s political effects emerge. Foregrounding the everyday ethical work animating data worlds gives new insights into how numeric infrastructures thrive and fail within emerging socio-cultural and politico-legal milieus.