At the first conference of STSing e.V., which focused on the topic of „Leakage“, Martina Klausner spoke about how commercial data sets integrated into the City of Frankfurt’s systems sometimes allow market-based logic and traces of profit-oriented data collection practices to find their way into the data practices and data portals of the city administration. To do this, Martina Klausner drew on a relational understanding of the state as developed in state anthropological literature.
Data-based Governance and Partial Data Connections. Tracing Data Politics of and for a „Verkehrswende“
Panel
Digital Statecraft
Author
Martina Klausner
Abstract
The digitization of public administration and governance infrastructures is often framed as data-driven efforts to enhance more efficient and transparent ways of governing. While public administration could be considered a fertile ground for datafication due to its long history of data collection with regards to its territories and populations, in practice, datafying public administration turn out to be rather complex and at least not straightforward. In my contribution, I trace data practices within public administration and ask how and which data are generated/captured and how these data circulate or not. Doing so, my talk attempts to bring together STS approaches to the study of the state and politics with approaches in Critical Data Studies. The talk will draw from a case study on implementing Verkehrswendepolitik (politics for a mobility turn) in Frankfurt am Main and discuss what we can learn about politics by tracing and tracking such data, but also by the absences of certain data and hindrances to their journeys. This allows, I argue, to attend to data politics as both politics done with data, but also the inherent “politics of data.”