Data, anecdotes, anecdotal data: feminist data activism against gendered violence post #Metoo

From critiques of baked-in sexism in data science, to the use of data in the service of feminism, feminist data activism has emerged as a new form of feminist activism. This paper approaches feminist data activism from a data imaginary perspective, focusing on a prominent feminist initiative from Australia called She's A Crowd, an organization that claims to have crowdsourced the world's largest dataset of gendered violence. Through interviews with 11 participants who volunteered their “datafied stories” to the organization, I explore the grassroots imaginaries about what data is and what it can do for the collective struggle against gendered violence. I show that participants’ experiences with not being believed led them to see data-driven stories as having superior epistemic value over qualitative narratives. Paradoxically, even when data is viewed as superior due to its detachment from the personal, concerns about its authenticity and quality persist. Consequently, participants advocated for increased data collection as the ultimate solution to address these limitations. Thus, if the imaginary of a binary between “data” and “stories” privileges data as a superior epistemic solution, the imaginary of limitation reinforces more data collection as the only solution imaginable. I argue that at stake is how these imaginaries locate the legitimacy of marginalized experiences within the dataset, obscuring how data collected from the grassroots might circulate within and be interpreted by hegemonic knowledge practices. This paper opens a conversation about feminist data activism and the power relations it is enmeshed within, an area that remains under explored.