This workshop is intended as an exploration of what happens analytically when ‘data’ are put up against, compared with, juxtaposed with or thought through other sorts of knowing and doing. What happens when data practices are compared with or thought about in conjunction with that which lies outside them, or seems ‘other’ to them? It poses these questions in a time when data and the digital are being heralded as the means to unite, connect and level the world as known and governed. Thus this workshop is intended to problematize assumptions about what connectivity or unity might consist in, and to serve as a reminder of the existence of difference, otherness, what we do not yet know and cannot just include.
I was invited to present at a workshop of British researchers convened around this theme. I prepared a paper based on work that Matt Campbell and Michael Christie had published about governance practices around Alice Springs Town Camp houses. Of course these governance practices involve data: information assembled—often by Indigenous research teams like those Matt works with in Tangentyere Council. But also, these governance practices involve storying: the circulating of multiple narratives about each individual house. Both data and stories contain information crucial to good governance of the houses in Alice Springs Town Camps. ‘How can these be worked together?’, I asked. How can each information form be valued in its own right, and the differences between them respected? I proposed that governance can develop as a politics of dissensus which takes difference seriously if we learn how to do that.
But, in my talk I did not narrate this paper because I felt some background needed to be offered before the significance of the distinction between ‘doing data’ and ‘doing stories’ could be appreciated. Here are the slides (slightly modified) of the talk I gave. Of course Matt, Michael and I will discuss whether the paper I wrote and which was commented on by a discussant, might have a future. A lively discussion focusing in part on objects of governance and the forms of information they might require for a rich life, ensued.