Abstract:
This workshop aims to problematise conventional conceptualizations of data as known, familiar and inert objects, in order to imagine more complex, creative, critical, and relational engagements with data in the conduct of qualitative inquiry. Participants will be invited to share and relate their own data and data potentialities in diverse ways, as well as to work with examples and activities provided by the organizer. We will consider how recent developments in theory and methodology, such as post-methodology, 'new materialisms' and performance studies, are forcing us to rethink our habitual assumptions about data's potentialities and our relationality with data. Attendees will engage with different data flows and interactions, as part of a joint effort to push normative boundaries possible limiting the infinite possibilities of data. The workshop will collectively question the functions of data within participants' research projects through individual re-imagining and collective re-working activities. We will focus on 1) collectively produced and performed data, 2) dissonance, order, messiness of data 3) decision making and relational processes, 4) insufficiency of language. Participants are encouraged to think with philosophy, experimentation, and creativity to see what might become possible. Where might various extensions of d...a...t...a go and what could they do?