Data Loss Reverberations: Exploring Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies
Category: Event
This panel explores data loss as a fundamental rather than anomalous feature of digital infrastructures and datafication processes. While digital societies are often associated with data accumulation, we examine how various forms of loss - from disappearance and destruction to dispossession - shape socio-technical systems and generate new political formations. We seek papers investigating data loss in knowledge and memory infrastructures, including memory institutions, bureaucratic systems, and community archives. Topics of interest include: Data disappearance in digital archives Data destruction as acts of violence or care Community impacts of platform closures and content moderation Critical perspectives on data/software lifecycles Memory technologies as inherently amnesic systems Theoretical frameworks for understanding data loss Methodological approaches to studying loss Politics of loss in relation to memory and justice While STS scholarship has developed frameworks for studying knowledge infrastructures - from cybernetic imaginaries to big data environments - research has primarily focused on data accumulation and persistence. Through concepts like data friction and information infrastructures, scholars have illuminated conditions enabling data flows. This panel extends this work by examining loss and erasure as constitutive forces in digital systems. We especially welcome submissions from early career researchers and scholars examining how data loss intersects with gender, sexuality, racialization, coloniality, and class. We are particularly interested in work that critically engages with these dimensions of power and inequality in digital infrastructures. We encourage submissions exploring how data loss reverberates across: Time (historical erasures echoing in the present) Scale (small infrastructural losses with cascading effects) Space (loss rippling across institutional/national boundaries) Experience (from technical infrastructures to social practices) The panel aims to develop new frameworks for understanding how data loss shapes knowledge infrastructures and influences questions of memory, accountability, and justice.
Initiator(s):
Katie MacKinnon
,
Nanna bonde thylstrup
,
University of Copenhagen
Deadline: 31.01.2025
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-_eInuIo2XdzW8i71xqnK5q649Rptk1T3kJa0yzatE8/edit?tab=t.0
Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein