Data injustice can occur in a variety of ways. In the context of environmental justice, one of the most important questions for evaluating whether data injustice is present is: do stakeholders have the data they need to understand and respond to environmental hazards in this setting? For example, if workers in a factory do not know the health risks of prolonged exposure to the chemicals they work with every day (or even whether they have been exposed), that is an example of data injustice.
Data injustice can also refer to ways that data contributes to other forms of injustice through a failure to adequately represent the world. This might occur through miscounting the people affected by an issue (see this article about the 2020 Census under- and over-counting population), prioritizing one issue over another just because more people are affected, or privileging one form of data over another (for example, statistics over qualitative accounts of a problem).
United States Census Bureau - “The Census Bureau's mission is to serve as the nation's leading provider of quality data about its people and economy.”
Los Angeles Data Justice Hub - “The Data Justice Hub is an initiative that empowers students, community organizations, and faculty to access and use data to rectify harm. We hope this digital tool will help train the next generation of social justice and data change agents.”
Catalyst California - Research and Data Analysis - “The Research & Data Analysis team engages in innovative research designed to reveal racial inequities and shift narratives and power. We focus on providing relevant, rigorous, and actionable data for campaign development, policy formation, and initiative building. We highlight the issues affecting communities most impacted by systemic racial injustice in climate, education, civic engagement, and more.”
Global Data Justice - “The Global Data Justice project focuses on the diverse debates and processes occurring around data governance in different regions, to draw out overarching principles and needs that can push data technologies’ governance in the direction of social justice.”
This lack of data could be for a number of reasons. The data could exist somewhere and be unavailable to certain groups as the result of intentional campaigns to hide or discredit scientific knowledge about environmental hazards. For example, ExxonMobil and other oil companies conducted extensive studies in the 1970s and 80s that confirmed the role of burning fossil fuels on climate change, but refused to release the studies and publicly denied that fossil fuels impacted climate change. Greenwashing, or the practice of portraying a company or product as environmentally friendly when it is not, is a variation of this type of data injustice.
The data also simply might not exist because the problem has not yet received enough attention or is challenging to study in some way. For example, Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) were only discovered to be hazardous relatively recently, so there are still large gaps in our knowledge about them–including how many people in the US have been exposed, how to remove PFAS from water, and the extent of their health effects.
Data injustice
occurs when people don’t have the information they need to understand and respond to the environmental hazards they are exposed to.
isn’t a problem if people have Internet access.
Data injustice
occurs when people don’t have the information they need to understand and respond to the environmental hazards they are exposed to.
isn’t a problem if people have