Call for practitioners/panelists: Big Data Activism for Social Justice

[Max Liboiron]

Big Data Activism for Social Justice
The dangers of Big Data, including the costs of surveillance and a loss of privacy, are well known to many people who experience them every day in interactions with banks, credit card companies, employers, retail businesses, policing, and health care. This panel explores the possibilities, challenges, and tools activists and everyday people use to resist Big Data, or use it for social change. What are the bottom-up tactics and strategies people are already using to trouble or transform Big Data? Is it possible to challenge unjust top-down Big Data practices to promote justice?

We are looking for two panelists to join us at Theorizing the Web symposium from April 15–16 in New York City at the Museum of the Moving Image. We are particularly interested in participants who are activists, practitioners, journalists, and other types of non-academics, as well as those who aim to decolonize data and/or highlight structures of power that are created and perpetuated through data structures.

If you are interested, please contact Alex Fink (fink...@umn.edu) and Max Liboiron (mlib...@mun.ca) with a short description of what you would like to present by January 10th, 2016.

Max Liboiron

Assistant Professor
| www.maxliboiron.com | twitter @maxliboiron |

Department of Sociology & Program in Environmental Sciences

Memorial University of Newfoundland

| Discard Studies | Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research |