Dear all,

We are welcoming proposals for our open panel at 4S Sydney, 29 August - 
1 September 2018

*Data worldings: post/colonial connectedness* (#87)

Data infrastructures have taken centre stage in many of the strands 
which comprise the environmental, bio- and geosciences: from 
biodiversity assessments and conservation efforts to environmental 
monitoring and the development of “urban biomes”. Data infrastructures 
are producing unprecedented amounts of data and figures, advancing a 
primarily data-based understanding of worlds and compelling the coming 
together of different rationalities, imaginaries, economies and agencies 
in the pursuit of ever more integration across and connection between data.

Having worked in the context of the biological and ecological sciences, 
their infrastructures and institutions, we observe that these 
rationalities, imaginaries, economies and agencies are deeply enmeshed 
with historical yet enduring imperial relations. Indeed, we would 
suggest that current desires to apprehend a totalised world at all 
scales—including bio- and atmo-spheres, cosmos, inner spaces and outer 
surfaces of bodies—exclusively through data need to be understood as 
constituted in and through colonial relations and their shifting 
material realities. STS-inflected scholarship on data and data 
infrastructures has provided useful insights into making, sharing and 
mobilisation of data as efforts to govern the furthermost reaches of the 
“natural empire” (Bowker 2000) and into their participation in 
racialising asymmetries. With this panel we wish to further problematize 
emergent data worldings drawing on postcolonial critiques of the 
“universal” and “global” to examine how data worldings are contingent on 
and enact specific colonial relations. We also want to explore how 
attending to data worldings can help us understand the ongoing unfolding 
and transformation of neo-colonial logics and practices.

You can submit here https://4s2018sydney.org/accepted-open-panels-4s/. 
The call for papers closes on *1st February, 2018*.

Tahani Nadim (Humboldt University and Natural History Museum Berlin) & 
Antonia Walford (University College London and Centre for Social Data 
Science, University of Copenhagen)

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