| Project Detail |
Navigating governance in a data-driven world Facial recognition cameras, digital identity systems, and health dashboards have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, replacing traditional human oversight with regulatory data infrastructures. These systems, integral to the post-pandemic governance model, exert influence over both public and private spheres, often at societal costs. In this context, the ERC-funded DATAGOV project explores how governance by data infrastructure evolves in European and non-Western democracies, including Brazil, India, and South Africa. By investigating technologies like biometrics, digital identity, and health tech, DATAGOV unveils their role as governance agents. The project also challenges Western-centric perspectives, introduces innovative participatory methods, and examines impacts on citizenship, state sovereignty, and inequality, offering insights into the future of democracy amidst pervasive datafication. Facial recognition cameras, digital identity systems, and health dashboards have become a staple of daily life. By generating data aimed at monitoring or decision-making, these “regulatory data infrastructures” take up functions that were once performed by humans inside state entities and public administrations. Regulatory data infrastructures are at the core of a new mode of governance normalized in the post-pandemic society, termed “governance by data infrastructure”. With the pandemic and generative AI accelerating the digital transition of society, regulatory data infrastructures are creeping further into public and private space—at high societal costs. DATAGOV explores the dynamics of governance by data infrastructure in the post-pandemic democracy in the European Union and non-Western countries (Brazil, India, and South Africa). It focuses on three consumer technologies disciplining the social—biometrics, digital identity and health technology—as living laboratories to explore how regulatory data infrastructures become agents of governance. Contributing to critical data studies, the project deploys qualitative and participatory methods to examine how governance by data infrastructure transforms three key areas of concern to the modern state: citizenship, state sovereignty, and inequality. DATAGOV breaks new ground in four areas. i) By mobilizing the notion of regulatory data infrastructure, it evaluates emerging data-centric assemblages and exposes the growing influence of the private sector on the welfare state. ii) By extending the gaze to non-Western democracies, it breaks with “Western” universalistic assumptions on the dynamics of datafication. iii) By developing participatory methods rooted in citizen science, it contributes to methodological innovation for the study of the datafied society. iv) By unmasking the impact of regulatory data infrastructure in the governance of the social, it charts the future of democracy amidst pervasive datafication. |
