From Data Governance to Data Ethics: Invoking Epistemological Plurality for Enabling a Critical Turn in ICT4D

This chapter contributes to the Critical Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) research in three ways. First, from within the field of critical data studies, the chapter reflects on the findings from four studies conducted at the Data Lab at Tallinn University of Technology. These studies explored various forms of social datafication, bringing to light the necessity to rethink data governance beyond its current normative standpoint towards the idea of data governance as a practice requiring ongoing negotiation among data experts, data subjects, and their context. Second, the chapter problematises such a conclusion, digging deeper into its ethical and epistemological foundations. This highlights the need for a relativisation of the kind of quantitative knowledge-as-fact imposed by the “datum” in favour of the recognition and cohabitation of other qualitative epistemologies. Third, the chapter takes up the challenge to operationalise this last insight by describing a course in data ethics for the city whose conceptual pillars were a sociotechnical understanding of data-driven technologies and a non-axiomatic, non-normative understanding of ethics.