Making the System see Itself: Participatory, Feminist and Visual Approaches to Data in Higher Education

The coloniality of knowledge (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) in higher education is instrumental in maintaining capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal oppression. We find power reproduced consistently at every level of the institution and in every touch point with it. In the access people have to the university; as a place of study and work. In the subtext of strategy, the focus of research and the descriptions of teaching content. It is deeply embedded in disciplinary knowledge, translated through curricula, pedagogies and teaching and learning methods. We also find it in structures, governance and outwardly in articulations of ‘social purpose;’

This complexity abstracts; making the topic theoretical and difficult to practically engage with. Yet in all aspects of this system we find data; active, latent, ephemeral, imperfect but ever present. What can collection and analysis of data tell us about the larger system? And in what ways can data visualization make a system see itself?

This presentation discusses a series of participatory design approaches that explore such questions. Developed at different levels of an institution, these moments of collective counter-mapping and reflection offer a counterpoint to ‘top down’ institutional approaches.

I argue that data visualization, by turning the absent into the present (Santos 2014), can make visible what ‘counts’ in an institution. This presentation invites discussion on how we use these forms of visual evidence to challenge ideas about what counts and what gets counted (Ignazio and Klein, 2020)