Data Justice and the Right to the City

Data Justice and the Right to the City engages with theories of social justice and data-driven urbanism. It explores the intersecting concerns of data justice - both the harms and civic possibilities of the datafied society - and the right to the city - a call to redress the uneven distribution of resources and rights in urban contexts. These concerns are addressed through a variety of topics: digital social services, as cities use data and algorithms to administer to citizens; education, as data-driven practices transform learning and higher education; labour, as platforms create new precarities and risks for workers; and activists who seek to make creative and political interventions into these developments. This edited collection proposes frameworks for understanding the effects of data-driven technologies at the municipal scale and offers strategies for intervention by both scholars and citizens.

Morgan Currie is Senior Lecturer in Data and Society at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests focus on open and administrative data, algorithms in the welfare state, activists’ data practices, cultural mapping and critical GIS. She is principal investigator of The Culture & Communities Mapping Project and co-leads the Digital Social Science Research Cluster at Centre for Data, Culture & Society.

Jeremy Knox is co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, where he leads a research theme on the ’Data Society’. His research interests include the relationships between education, data-driven technologies, and wider society. Jeremy’s published work includes critical perspectives on artificial intelligence (AI), learning analytics, data, and algorithms, as well as Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). He is associate editor of Postdigital Science and Education, and co-convenes the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) Digital University network.

Callum McGregor is a Lecturer in Education at the Institute for Education, Community and Society, University of Edinburgh. He teaches on the MSc Social Justice and Community Action and the MA Learning in Communities. Callum is also an affiliate of the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI). Callum’s research interests are inter-disciplinary and address the relationship between democratic citizenship, education and the politics of policy. Within this broad context, he has published recently on topics as broad as education for climate justice, learning for democracy in the context of populism and radical digital citizenship.