Grassroots Data Activism

Abstract

M, a professional community organizer in the midwestern United States who works with undocumented youth, talks us through a typical day at work. Her role focuses on the creation, aggregation, and analysis of data using a commercial platform called EveryAction, but she chafes at questions about the procedures, formats, or outputs of data work. Our research team asks a series of questions that prompt respondents such as M to describe the qualities of the data they work with and what they do with it—questions we have used to study other kinds of data professionals, at city offi ces and in public school districts. After several prodding questions that turn again and again to the particulars of data in her work, M fi nally tells our interviewers bluntly, “What I’ve learned from many years, now at this point over ten years of organizing, mostly around immigrant rights, is that yes, maybe numbers and facts do cause a shock factor. But people are motivated and persuaded to change because of their feelings and how they feel about something. And you can use that data to help them feel in a particular way, but that’s where the storytelling comes in.”1 The ongoing public crises of the 2020s illustrate the accelerating datafi cation of contemporary government bodies at all levels. Public life is increasingly organized around engagements with data, especially data in visual form.2 Dashboards produced by national, county, state, and city bureaucracies displayed the grim, unrelenting number of COVID-19 deaths nation-