Critical Data Lab
* The Critical Data Lab ... "is a space for digital critiques and critiques of the digital".
URL = https://www.criticaldatalab.org/
Description
... The Critical Data Lab (CDL) explores the politics and power of digitality on the grounds of a critical-theoretical approach towards data and the digital.
Combining a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and taking particular inspiration from Critical Data Studies, the Lab critically analyses the political, economic, social and cultural implications of digital media and networked technologies. Our aim is to promote critical interventions in theory and practice.
CDL was founded in 2022. While the Lab has been institutionally hosted by Humboldt University from the beginning, since the end of 2024 it is collaboratively hosted by Humboldt University Berlin and Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg."
Research
The politics of data
"As our societies are ever more shaped by digital environments that give rise to data inequalities and algorithmic injustice the Critical Data Lab explores how digitality is not neutral but political. While investigating the politics of the digital we also analyse how politics changes in the digital age.
The power of data
The contemporary digital condition is shaped by asymmetric regimes of power, Big Tech monopolies, and the platform economy. We investigate the particular forms and ambivalences of power––from epistemic, infrastructural, and network power to digital governmentalities––that define the technopolitical and socioeconomic status quo and the counter-powers that emerge to resist it.
Data and Critique
What is the place for critique in the digital constellation and how is critique changing under conditions of digitality? How can we redefine a contemporary critical theory of digitality? How can we envision critical data practices that deconstruct established hegemonies in the digital sphere?
Data Imaginaries
Digital futures are already here, they are just unevenly distributed. How can we bring about just and equitable data futures that escape the lure of digital capitalism and overcome the current apparatuses of surveillance and capture without relapsing into the ideology of tech-solutionism?"