“Deeply thought-provoking work that unsettles our assumptions about data and the digital political economy in original ways.” — Angela Daly, Co-editor of Good Data and Professor of Law and Technology, University of Dundee/University of Newcastle (AU)
“Beautifully written and rewarding in the way in which feminist and Indigenous perspectives are offered to shine light on some of the most challenging questions of justice of our time.” — Joris van Hoboken, Author of Search Engine Freedom and Professor of Information Law, with special emphasis on Law and Digital Infrastructure, University of Amsterdam
Book Details
ISBN: 9789464513226
378 Pages
182 x 257 mm
Price: £34.90 (limited edition softcover)
Publisher: The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI)
Publication Date: 30 December 2025
License: Migrantifa Commons BY-NC
Open Access Download (subject to licensing terms): Unsettling Data on pdf
Book Description
What prevents data governance law from redressing the widespread exploitation of labour and land rampant across the data economies of our digital Earth? Unsettling Data answers this question by scrutinising the legal grammar of ‘data’ to expose the persistence of hierarchical power relations between the observer and the observed. The role of the modern legal form in fortifying and obscuring these power relations is elucidated. Proposing representationalism as the framework to map these hidden yet pervasive power relations, the book reveals how the representationalist legal form serves to delink the agency of the data subject from unjust labour and land exploitation in the digital political economy. Highlighting the importance of Indigenous/Adivasi perspectives for unsettling the philosophical core of Western(ised) data governance, Unsettling Data argues for the formal reconceptualisation of data as the entangled human and unhuman agencies implicated in its production; paving the way for a new legal grammar of data rooted in relational reciprocity.
Unsettling Data will be of interest to readers in critical legal theory, law and humanities, law and political economy, data protection, information law, AI governance, intellectual property as well as anyone seeking to understand the legal form or aesthetics of data from a critical lens.
Table of Contents
Note from the Author
Acknowledgments
Poem: I am not your data
Part I: Framing Representationalism
1. Introduction
2. Representationalism and Data’s Legal Form
Part II: Exposing Representationalist Configurations
3. Data Within the Non-Law
4. Data Within the Law
5. Data between the Legal Person and Thing
Part III: Unsettling Representationalist Imaginaries
6. Data and the Erasure of Human Agency
7. Data and the Erasure of Unhuman Agency
Epilogue
Beyond Representationalism: Divinatory Play Projects
Beyond Representationalism: Tactics of Earthy Data