Predatory Data

Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-520-40284-3
Verlag: University of California

Buch, Englisch, 262 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 149 mm x 224 mm, Gewicht: 400 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chan, Anita Say

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie von Migranten und Minderheiten
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikation & Medien in der Politik
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftssektoren & Branchen Medien-, Informations und Kommunikationswirtschaft Informationstechnik, IT-Industrie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gewalt und Diskriminierung: Soziale Aspekte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Politische Propaganda & Kampagnen, Politik & Medien
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

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.