Overview

The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's often violent and extractive ""big data"" regimes. Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data. While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Full Product Details

Author:   Anita Say Chan
Publisher:   University of California Press
Imprint:   University of California Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.363kg
ISBN:  

9780520402843

ISBN 10:   0520402847
Pages:   262
Publication Date:   07 January 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments  Introduction: Predatory Data: Civic Amputations in the Global Data Economy  1 • Immigrant Excisions, “Race Suicide,” and the Eugenic Information Market  2 • Streamlining’s Laboratories: Monitoring Culture and Eugenic Design in the Future City  3 • Of Merit, Metrics, and Myth: Cognitive Elites and Techno-Eugenics in the Knowledge Economy  4 • Relational Infrastructures: Feminist Refusals and Immigrant Data Solidarities  5 • The Coalitional Lives of Data Pluralism: Intergenerational Feminist Resistance to Data Apartheid  6 • Community Data: Pluri-Temporalities in the Aftermath of Big Data  Conclusion: Data Pluralism and a Playbook for Defending Improbable Worlds  Notes  References  Index 

Reviews

""An illuminating and unsettling depiction of Big Tech as deeply enmeshed in an ethically compromised brand of social science."" * Publishers Weekly * “Informatively enhanced for the reader's benefit with the inclusion of a twenty-four page listing of references, ten pages of notes, and a four page index, Predatory Data is an impressive and original work of exhaustive research that is thoroughly 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation. An invaluable and especially recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and college/university library Communication & Media Studies collections and supplemental Feminist Theory and Computer Technology/Industry curriculum studies lists.”   * Midwest Book Review *

Author Information

Anita Say Chan is a feminist and decolonial scholar of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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