(Dis)Trust in Public-Sector Data, Technology, and Science - III: Census, Technology, and Numbers

Abstract

STS scholarship on technopolitics typically examines the role that governments and state organizations play in producing, enabling, and leveraging data, technology, and science. Technocratic projects like conducting censuses, modeling weather, producing medicines, constructing computers or developing weapons serve both state and scientific masters. While the legitimacy of these investments are often intertwined with the legitimacy of state power, such power¬and legitimacy also relies upon scientific development and the sustained production of technoscientific imaginaries.

Yet recent years have witnessed a range of governmental actions around the world designed to purposefully delegitimize states’ technoscientific investments. Politicians work to dismantle state-funded scientific efforts, often under the guise of free-market commitments and austerity principles. The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the global cost of distrust in public-sector science, technology, and data. Even as scientists produced a vaccine with unprecedented speed, governments around the world failed to track the spread of the virus, let alone provide data to enable decision-making. In some countries, political leaders are propagated conspiracies and “fake science”, undermining public health and scientific development.

Just as governments can help advance science, technology, and data, they may also choose to strategically curb such pursuitsor actively undermine their legitimacy.
This panel examines how public-sector technoscientific efforts are made legitimate, and how that legitimacy is strategically undermined. We ask, how are state-sponsored science and technology projects legitimated? How can this legitimacy come undone? How can trust in public-sector technoscience be repaired?

This third of three panels focuses on population census and trust in numbers.

Chair

• danah boyd, Microsoft Research / Data & Society

Individual Presentations

• “Filling in the Gaps”: Investigating Civil Society Organizations' Role in the 2020 United States Census - William Clyde Partin, Data & Society Research Institute; Cristina Maria Lopez Guevara, Data & Society; Emma Margolin, Data & Society Research Institute; Charley Johnson, Data & Society Research Institute; danah boyd, Microsoft Research / Data & Society

• Reaching the "Hard to Count:" Trusted Messengers and the Effort to Avert a Census Undercount - Hannah Obertino Norwood, University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

• Quieter, powerful and uncontested: implications of methodological changes in population censuses - Byron Villacis

• Faith in Australian numbers: personal and institutional networks of trust in public data - Samantha Vilkins, Australian National University

• Negotiating Public/Private Boundaries through Minutiae: How Information Systems (De)legitimate Governmental Knowledge in Government Outsourcing - Annalisa Pelizza, Dpt Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna

Session Organizers

• Janet Vertesi, Princeton University

• Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton