Dreaming with data: Cultivating critical consciousness in datafied living research

Abstract

This paper addresses data reflexivity in terms of critical consciousness-raising by linking people’s everyday encounters with data to their speculative visions about datafied futures. We suggest everyday encounters with data about oneself might play an important role in facilitating both personal and collective imagination about data and devising future paths towards legitimate and meaningful datafied living. Lending inspiration from the figure of the researcher as critical companion and from speculative design, we posit that critical consciousness-raising is not something generated purely by way of informing people about datafication, but built from below, through people’s everyday experiences with datafying themselves and being datafied by others. Furthermore, it is deeply intertwined with datafication research itself, and the way we seek to establish links between individual and collective experiences and evaluations of data practices. Based on this, the paper offers three methodological entry points for exploring how critical consciousness can be cultivated and collectivized: longitudinal fieldwork with repeated interviews, data visualization derived from people’s own phones, and speculative workshops on future data practices.