Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics

Abstract

In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that 'push back' against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency's EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network's maps of real-time ozone levels in Houston. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, we analyse how critical data designers turn scientific data and findings into claims and visualisations that are meaningful in contemporary political terms. The skills of critical data designers cross scales and domains; they must identify problems calling for public consideration, and then locate, access, link, and create visualisations of data relevant to the problem. We conclude by describing hazards ahead in work to leverage Big Data to understand and address environmental problems. Critical data designers need to understand what counts as a societal problem in a particular context, what doesn't, what is seen as connected and not, what is seen as ethically charged, and what is exonerated and discounted. Such recognition is produced through interpretive, 'close reading' of the historical moment in which they operate.

Grassroots resource mobilization through counter-data action

“…This motivation is common within the rhetoric of data. Particularly in civic contexts, there exists the idea that data can and should be precise and true and that such data, if appropriately collected and maintained, can improve decision-making (Baack, 2016; Fortun et al., 2016; Rieder and Simon, 2016; Rosenberg, 2013). This strategy of collecting and presenting data is not new to WALT’s community—and by community we refer to both race and place.…”

“…Throughout the discourse on communities and data, there is a persistent theme of empowerment—an assumption (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) that the possession and use of data by communities can be enabling (Corburn, 2005; Fortun et al., 2016; Loh et al., 2002; Ogneva-Himmelberger et al., 2010). As discussed in the earlier sections on OGD and critical data studies, literature from those fields set up the expectation that data will empower marginalized groups.…”

When data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice

“…Third, efforts to create positive politics must carry through critiques of those same politics. As we continue our action-focused projects, which both create participatory civic technologies and new environmental data infrastructures, we look to existing examples of feminist data visualization (D'Ignazio & Klein, 2016) and critical data design practices (Costanza-Chock, 2018;Fortun et al, 2016) in order to consider how we can deepen our critique of extractive logic, even as it exists in our own practices, through material engagements. Some of these engagements include counter mapping (Kinchy et al, 2018) and community use of satellite and drone technologies to represent local, trans-generational knowledge.…”

Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together

“…Seeking to counter these harms, critical data studies and critical GIS scholars advocate for “counter‐data” and “counter‐mapping” tactics as part of “imagining radical politics with and against data” (Burns et al., , p. 2). They charge designers to become aware of the historical contexts they operate within (Fortun et al., ) and design reflexively in order to advance EJ (Gabrys et al., ; Moore et al., ). Researchers have developed feminist and qualitative approaches to traditionally positivist uses of GIS (D'Ignazio & Klein, ; Kwan & Knigge, ) and engaged in collaborative mapping with communities (Elwood, ; Wilson, ).…”