In this methods lab, Ana Delgado will first initiate a conversation on How to write a project proposal. After that, our guest to the methods lab Tone Walford will present their work on data justice. Below is an excerpt from the talk.
"In this talk I will present some half-baked ideas for a research project that would explore social and political practices of, and commitments to, ‘openness’. The adjective ‘Open’ has attached itself to a number of different domains over the years as an explicit political commitment – open access, open science, open market, open relationships, to name a few. But what is “openness” here? Where has it emerged from as an idea, or political premise? How does it articulate with other, similar ideas? What shapes does it take in the different socio-political contexts in which it is found, and how are these shapes contoured by longstanding imperial and colonial formations? Through what sets of practices has it developed and is it enacted? What are its limits? The larger research project would aim to explore these questions in comparative mode across three different domains in three different contexts (still to be decided!): knowledge (“open data/open science”), finance (“open market”), and kinship (“open relationships”). These three domains are interesting because they have in the western, anglophone imagination at least provided analogical resources for each other, borrowing and re-borrowing, and so I am hoping these borrowings will be traceable. But in this talk I will focus only on one of these domains, open data. I will present the initial ethnographic impetus for this project based on ethnographic work with environmental scientists, collaborative work on data justice, and some initial thoughts around a global Open Data initiative called the Intergovernmental Group On Earth Observations (GEO). I will focus explicitly on the methodological challenges of the project, which by taking ‘openness’ and global data infrastructures as its subject, seems ill-suited to ethnographic methods which – whether multi-sited, patchwork or otherwise – emerged from a commitment to situatedness and localness."