Civic Participation in the Datafied Society| Understanding Civic Participation and Realizing Data Justice

Authors

  • Natalie Fenton Goldsmiths, University of London

Keywords:

civic participation, democracy, the commons, civil society, data justice

Abstract

To understand civic participation in the datafied society and the possibilities for social change, we must foreground social and political injustices and understand how citizens are frozen out of society and “democratic” processes in general. This requires decentering technology in our analyses and interrogating the structural imbrication of injustices in a broader social, political, and economic context, while recognizing the need to identify and address technological injustices that occur. This article illustrates how British civil society has become less able to play an active role in democratic processes over the past decade as digital tools have proliferated. Rather, we find a disciplining of dissenting voices and depoliticization of civil society. The article argues that it is only when we take a holistic and structural approach to data injustices situated in conditions of oppression and domination that we can reach an understanding of what data justice might become to take us beyond technical/regulatory fixes that offer no more than the tweaking and taming of capitalism to a newly imagined democratic political economy beyond capitalism.

Author Biography

Natalie Fenton, Goldsmiths, University of London

Natalie Fenton is a Reader in the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London where she is Co-Director of both the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and the Goldsmiths Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. She has also worked in the Department of Communication Studies at Liverpool University and in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. Her publications include New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age (2009), Mediating Social Science (1998, with Alan Bryman, David Deacon and Peter Birmingham) and Trust and Civil Society (2000, with Fran Tonkiss, Andrew Passey and Les Hems). Her research is concerned to address the role the media play in the formation of identities and democracies and why and how people seek to change the world for socially progressive ends. Her work spans both cultural studies approaches and social scientific approaches to the study of media, culture and society. She has been an activist in the UCU (formerly AUT) for over 17 years including national President 2001-02. She has served on various national committees concerned with higher education employment related issues, is an experienced lobbyist, campaigner and negotiator. She has also written for the national press.

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Published

2023-05-18

Issue

Vol. 17 (2023)

Section

Special Sections

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