On Friday 13 November 2026, my colleague Sumin Myung and I will launch the Critical Data Studies Lab at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, with a day of conversation about how data and data-driven technologies shape our social and material worlds. This free event will be in person at Te Herenga Waka’s Kelburn Campus and online via Zoom, and you can register here.
The Critical Data Studies Lab examines how and why data matters: how it is conceptualised, produced, categorised, circulated, applied, and contested, and how these processes reflect and (re)produce power, equity, and lived experience.
We use the term critical in two related senses. First, it signals a commitment to examining the assumptions, values, and power relations embedded in data practices and journeys (Leonelli 2016). The idea that data is not neutral is long-established in critical data studies (Kitchin, 2014; Neff et al., 2017), prompting us to ask how data practices shape and are shaped by shifting conditions of knowledge production, political organisation, and physical environments, and how they become implicated in the often uneven distribution of benefits and harms (Biruk 2018). Second, it draws attention to moments of transition and change. Like a critical threshold, data practices can mark junctures when social relations, material and digital infrastructures, institutional arrangements, and forms of knowledge are reconfigured. Such junctures can be moments of possibility as well as disruption, creating space to imagine and work toward emergent futures (Petryna 2022).
Our use of the term lab is inspired by the tradition of social science labs housed in universities worldwide: institutional spaces for research, collaboration, dialogue, and imagination (CLEAR 2021; McDonald, 2026). Through seminar series, reading groups, and workshops, the CDS Lab will foster interdisciplinary conversations about data. The following is a list of potential (and by no means exhaustive) topics:
- Indigenous data sovereignty and governance
- Data-driven technologies and AI
- Surveillance, privacy, and accountability
- The data-driven university
- Data feminisms, queer data studies, and critical disability studies approaches to data
- Data, environments, and material worlds
- Data justice, ethics, and governance
- Data colonialism and extractive economies
- Big Data alternatives and sustainable data practices
The CDS Lab Launch on 13 November features a keynote presentation from Dr Donna Cormack (Associate Professor at Te Kupenga Hauora Māori, University of Auckland, and Data Technician at Te Kāhui Raraunga) and a roundtable discussion on what critical data studies might look like at Te Herenga Waka, followed by lunch and a master class for postgraduate students. Starting in February 2027, we will run a monthly Critical Data Studies seminar series and a reading group that meets every two months, to support ongoing conversations and create spaces for interdisciplinary collaboration and scholarship.
References
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Duke University Press.
CLEAR. 2021. CLEAR Lab Book: A living manual of our values, guidelines, and protocols, V.03. Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Leonelli, Sabina. 2016. Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study. The University of Chicago Press.
McDonald, Fiona P. 2026. “Critical Research Spaces as Scholarship: An Ethnography Lab as an Apparatus for the Experimental, the Imaginary, and the Relational.” American Anthropologist 128 (3): 469–479.
Neff, Gina, Anissa Tanweer, Brittnay Fiore-Gartland, and Laura Osburn. 2017. “Critique and Contribute: A Practice-Based Framework for Improving Critical Data Studies and Data Science.” Big Data, 5(2), 85–97.
Petryna, Adriana. 2022. Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change. Princeton University Press.
