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This article bridges theories and insights from critical data scholarship by asking how community organizers from minoritized communities conceptualize data. Prior research has defined these socially and culturally constructed definitions about what data are and what data do as “data imaginaries.” This study draws on 40 qualitative interviews with community organizers involved in issues like immigration, reproductive justice, education, and policing. Our study takes metaphors given to us by community organizers (i.e., ammunition, teeth, receipts, compass) to reveal their data imaginaries. Particularly, their data imaginaries define what data means to them and what purpose it serves in their organizing. We find that community organizers also shared critiques of the ways data has been used to oppress minoritized groups. Given these findings, we conclude by encouraging future work that explores how community organizers experience and articulate epistemic burdens. 

This systematic literature review synthesizes published sources from the ASIS&T Digital Library and the ACM Digital Library to develop a definition of the carceral state and to show how the term has been used in contemporary technology‐focused research. The carceral state concept has been adopted and applied widely in multiple areas of social scientific research to refer to the formal institutions of the criminal justice system proper and other social arrangements, ideologies, practices, and technologies that punish, surveil, and contain populations. Our review reveals a recent and increasing engagement with the carceral state in the collections surveyed. Encouraged by this increasing attention, this review is an attempt to introduce the carceral state as a guiding framework for tech‐society research and to consider implications for advancing responsibility, reflexivity, and care in the creation and evaluation of information systems, programs, and services. 

Critical data studies, a body of emergent research that draws on surveillance studies and other fields, investigates datafication, the increasing mediation of many forms of sociality by data-intensive, networked computation. Such research draws on well-trodden criticisms of the representational capacities of data and has recently offered the term “data justice” to direct this scholarly formation toward the harms of datafication. By failing to explicitly foreground the way that the capture and consultation of data constitutes a tactic by which the state sorts, controls, and limits the freedom of minoritized peoples, critical data studies substitutes an interest in describing forms of injustice for a commitment toward its undoing. I use McKittrick’s (2021) term “seeking liberation” to orient both surveillance studies and critical data studies scholarship away from mere description of the practices of data-intensive computation and surveillance and toward a shared project of justice for minoritized peoples. 

Community organizers build grassroots power and collective voice in communities that are structurally marginalized in representative democracy, particularly in minoritized communities. Our project explores how self-identified community organizers use the narrative potentials of data to navigate the promises of data activism and the simultaneous risks posed to working-class communities of color by data-intensive technologies. Our nine respondents consistently named the material, financial, intellectual, and affective demands of data work, as well as the provisional, tenuous possibility of accomplishing movement work via narratives bolstered by data. Our early results identified two important factors in community organizers’ assessment of the efficacy and political potential of narratives built with data: audience and legitimacy.