SOE team reveals youth approaches to data related to pandemic
A team of SOE researchers in collaboration with their community partners published their findings on youths’ critical data practices in a multi-pandemic in an AERA Open article. The authors of “Youth Critical Data Practices in the COVID-19 Multipandemic” are Angela Calabrese Barton, Day Greenberg, Chandler Turner, Devon Riter, Melissa Perez, Tammy Tasker, Denise Jones, Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl, and Elizabeth A. Davis.
The team’s work is part of an NSF RAPID project focused on learning about COVID-19 and its intersections with issues of justice. This study investigates how youth from two cities in the United States engage in critical data practices as they learn about and take action in their lives and communities in relation to COVID-19 and its intersections with justice-related concerns.
Findings illustrate how youth not only aimed to reveal the dynamic and human aspects of and relationships with data as they engage with/in the world as people who matter but also offered alternative infrastructures for counter data production and aggregation toward justice in the here and now and desired possible futures.
The team concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic has datafied youths’ lives on broader scales than ever before. To care for themselves and their communities, youth critically employed big data and layered on their own understanding of the pandemic through multiple sources, reimagining big data as a site of struggle for new futures where their lives are not taken out of their and their communities’ hands.
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