Attack the Data: Agency, Power, and Technopolitics in South African Data Activism

Abstract

This article deploys a discursive–material analytical framework to trace how perceptions of data power are constructed in urban activist circles against data’s capacity to advance grassroots political goals. By framing South African data activism practices as a form of technopolitics—a concept that foregrounds the coconstitution of politics and technology through their anchoring to normative discourses—this analysis identifies how data are enrolled to substantiate a grassroots political discourse of spatial injustice yet how, through contestation by government officials, the fragility of data as objects of grassroots political power is laid bare. This empirical study of service provision social audits in Johannesburg and Cape Town shows how governments have effectively resisted their findings by singling out the quantitative data as a weak actor, exploiting this as an opportunity to advance their own political discourse of responsibility around service provision. In revealing how grassroots power was eventually strengthened through a strategic redistribution of agencies, the article then advances a nondeterministic understanding of data power and agency as relational, partial, and provisional and enacted through the coconstitution of people, technologies, and discourses, which might resonate with other examples of data activism and further urban data assemblages. These findings add empirical weight to claims of empowerment made in the emerging fields of data activism and data justice, and they raise further important questions for geographers and others interested in the ways in which data are enrolled to enact grassroots politics, as well as the discursive–material dimensions of urban technopolitics more generally. Key Words: data determinism, data imaginary, data justice, spatial justice, technopolitics.