Counting Inequality, Claiming Citizenship: Toward a Global Ethnography of Practices and Infrastructures of Datafication from the Global South

What does it mean to become a citizen through data? As states, platforms, and development agencies increasingly rely on metrics to see, govern, and intervene, datafication is reshaping how political membership is recognized and contested—often most starkly in unequal urban peripheries. In this talk, we present the core agenda of the ERC Starting Grant InfoCitizen, which is building a global ethnography of the practices and infrastructures through which data are produced, circulated, and made consequential in the Global South. We approach data not as neutral evidence but as a field of struggle over visibility, recognition, and rights—where categories, standards, and enumerative encounters become sites of both exclusion and political possibility.

Building on multi-sited ethnographic research across community organizations, bureaucracies, and citizen-expert networks, we trace the “full chain” through which inequality becomes data: from everyday encounters of enumeration and classification, to the making of indicators and dashboards, to the policy pathways that translate numbers into interventions. We show how civil society actors engage in technopolitical forms of informational citizenship—contesting official metrics, repurposing racial and territorial categories, producing alternative counts and maps, and mobilizing “data publics” to pressure institutions. At the same time, we examine the frictions and ethical dilemmas that emerge when participatory data practices meet bureaucratic infrastructures and transnational standards.

We argue that data ecosystems in the Global South are inherently multidimensional: they combine state statistics and bureaucratic routines with community-based enumeration, platform infrastructures, activist expertise, and transnational measurement standards—often operating simultaneously and in tension. We conclude by showing how the linked FWO strand zooms into a critical site within this broader ecology: the making of ethno-racial inequality in Brazil. By following classificatory struggles, expert disputes, and institutional negotiations around official numbers, we show how “unequal numbers” are produced—and how they can also be re-visualized, debated, and repurposed through participatory interfaces and public-facing experiments that expand (or constrain) what becomes visible, thinkable, and actionable.

Moisés Kopper is Research Professor at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, and Principal Investigator in the ERC Starting Grant “Informational Citizenship: Toward a Global Ethnography of Practices and Infrastructures of Datafication in the Global South.” Kopper held postdoctoral appointments at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, the Free University of Brussels, and the Center for Metropolitan Studies. He recently authored ‘Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil’s Public Housing,’ and co-edited ‘Subjectivity at Latin America’s Urban Margins.’ Kopper is Associate Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

The event is part of the Lecture Series Democratic Resilience through Civil Society.