At STS Hub 2025 in Berlin, which was held under the heading „Diffracting the Critical“, our project was represented with a contribution on the various forms of boundary work that civil society actors perform in connection with their data practices. The presentation dealt with the role of voluntary data work in negotiations on a transport transition. Activists in Frankfurt collect cycling and pedestrian traffic data to support their concerns with numerical evidence and are repeatedly confronted with discussions about data validity. Data itself becomes an object of boundary work and is at the same time a tool for collaboration and the renegotiation of boundaries and responsibilities.
The Politics of Voluntary Data Labor: Activist Boundary Work in Urban Mobility Transformation
Panel
Demarcating boundaries of and with data: Boundary work in the age of datafication
Author
Catharina Dietrich
Abstract
The demand for numerical evidence is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and administrative decision making and audible in public debates (Rieder and Simon, 2016). The field of urban mobility is no exception. In the heated debates over a sustainable traffic transition, experiential knowledge is often dismissed as unreliable.
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In my research on activist data practices in Frankfurt, Germany, I observed that civic actors engage in voluntary data labor to meet these demands. Activists collect and generate digital data on cycling and pedestrian traffic to underpin their claims. By employing measuring devices and counting practices, they reconfigure their sensory perceptions into numerical evidence. Their effort to produce knowledge that is seen as neutral and credible, and to frame it as “citizen science”, involves considerable boundary work. As the data they produce is often contested, they find themselves in ongoing negotiations about what counts as valid knowledge and what characterizes trustworthy data.