Teaching and Learning with Situated Data: Socio-Technical Pedagogy and Reform at the Community Data Clinic and Biological Computer Lab

This paper reviews how situated data methods were used to critically engage students in sociotechnical case studies drawn from campus history and archives in courses developed under the Community Data Clinic and the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In contrast to conventional data practices—that have long been critiqued by feminist, critical race and decolonial STS scholars for conditioning researchers to adopt a disembodied, de-gendered, -raced and -classed “God’s eye view from nowhere” (Haraway 1988) in order to project claims to objectivity and universality, situated data practices underscore the need for acknowledging the kinds of epistemic violence that a reproduction of “seeing from nowhere” expands, including through accelerating trends in datafication on and off university campuses. Pedagogy around situated data cultivates instead more accountable research practices through acknowledging the specificity of data that researchers collect and the necessary partiality of any researcher’s ability to see and know. As I review here, too, situated data methods offer valuable lessons for teachers and scholars in critical data and STS fields working to preserve pluralist, human-centered approaches to data in the face of accelerating campus investments in industry-centered data science programs. Indeed, at a time when STS and critical data scholars are witnessing the rapid growth of data science programs on campuses that train students to uncritically meet the profit-driven demands of datafication driven largely by Big Tech companies, the adoption of situated data methods to revisit sociotechnical practice and STS’ own overlooked histories of innovation in intersection with counter-cultural politics in the US uncovers the richness of alternative resources. Such histories can highlight how sociotechnical change and infrastructural transformation are more than just the domain of industry sectors or elite knowledge institutions, especially when they involve justice-based reforms.