Doing Sociology organized a research colloquium by Dr. Preeti Raghunath on her new and ongoing research on data governance in South and South-East Asia. Dr. Raghunath is a Lecturer at Monash University, Malaysia. She works at the intersections of critical media policy and media anthropology. Her book titled Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach was published as part of the Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change Series. She is currently working on data policies and practices in South and Southeast Asia.

Abstract:

Earlier forms of datafication of societies notwithstanding, (colonial) modernity brought with it particular forms of datafication (census-making and ways of categorizing people, introduction of certain standards of measurement, etc.). This also set in place the associated governance of people as data. Today, high technology-driven datafication accelerates and consolidates this process, with newer policies for data governance being explored and implemented by national governments and regional bodies. India has been toying with versions of Bills and Reports that propose to govern personal and non-personal data, while Malaysia and Singapore have amended previous existing Personal Data Protection Acts over the last couple of years. Designed as a research pitch, this conversation proposes the historicizing and contextualizing of this present-day tryst with data governance in South and Southeast Asia, in a bid to go beyond legal analysis to bring in the offerings of critical policy ethnography. Drawing attention to the making of ‘Datacorp’ as a key policy actor in data governance, this talk presents some initial arguments and outlines a research project in the making.