Finding Life in Data: How Youth Engage Data in their Lives towards Data Education Justice

Research on how learners’ lived experiences, identities, and sociopolitical contexts shape learning with and through data is an emerging area of study. This study contributes to this growing body of work by examining how minoritized youth learn with data by enlivening it. Enlivening data foregrounds how young people integrate institutional datasets with embodied, emotional, historical, and community-generated forms of data to make data matter in their lives. Using an abductive analytic approach, we identify three interrelated data savvy processes through which youth enliven data: (1) transforming lived experiences into new forms of data, (2) integrating canonical data with embodied and felt knowledge, and (3) strategically recruiting more powerful stakeholders to legitimate and act upon these data. We argue that these processes expand notions of data justice by emphasizing the historical, embodied, and relational dimensions of datafication. Furthermore, we argue that across cases, youths’ practices reveal a justice-oriented form of data savvy - an ethical, relational, and political orientation toward data that extends beyond technical competencies. The study advances theories of data learning by centering youths’ brilliance as data thinkers and change agents who reconstitute and mobilize data toward more equitable and humanizing futures.