Workshop: Digital Literacies and Digital Inclusion in Contemporary Brazil

As digital data becomes an increasingly integral element of everyday social and cultural life, data literacies need to be considered central to an expanded definition of digital literacies. Recent research (e.g. Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2020) has attended to the harms and social injustices associated with ‘datafication’, including for instance discrimination, manipulation and misinformation, which impact most severely on people who are already discriminated against or excluded in other areas of social life.

In this paper I will draw on a review of recent research to discuss how data literacies have been conceptualised, and review strategies used to develop people’s data literacies to further aims of social justice and citizen empowerment. Drawing on this, I will argue that we need to go beyond increasing technical skills or becoming ‘informed consumers’ if we are to work towards more critical, socially-informed and open-ended models of data literacies.

Bringing together New Literacies Studies (Gillen and Barton, 2010; Gee, 2015), sociomaterial theoretical approaches (Barad, 2007; Lupton, 2018) and innovative methodologies (Seaver, 2017; Masson, van Es and Wieringa, 2020) I argue that data literacies need to be understood as culturally situated, plural and dynamic communication practices that create as well as represent our social worlds. I will outline an approach to conceptualising and developing data literacies that addresses the social impacts of datafication which works from our position as subjects within an already datafied society, and will discuss the potential of creative, playful and open-ended data literacies to empower citizens and advance social justice.