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Attack the Data: Agency, Power, and

Technopolitics in South African Data Activism

Jonathan Cinnamon

To cite this article: Jonathan Cinnamon (2019): Attack the Data: Agency, Power, and
Technopolitics in South African Data Activism, Annals of the American Association of Geographers,
DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2019.1644991

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Published online: 23 Sep 2019.

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 Attack the Data: Agency, Power, and
Technopolitics in South African Data Activism
Jonathan Cinnamon
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Ryerson University
This article deploys a discursive–material analytical framework to trace how perceptions of data power are
constructed in urban activist circles against data’s capacity to advance grassroots political goals. By framing
South African data activism practices as a form of technopolitics—a concept that foregrounds the
coconstitution of politics and technology through their anchoring to normative discourses—this analysis
identifies how data are enrolled to substantiate a grassroots political discourse of spatial injustice yet how,
through contestation by government officials, the fragility of data as objects of grassroots political power is
laid bare. This empirical study of service provision social audits in Johannesburg and Cape Town shows how
governments have effectively resisted their findings by singling out the quantitative data as a weak actor,
exploiting this as an opportunity to advance their own political discourse of responsibility around service
provision. In revealing how grassroots power was eventually strengthened through a strategic redistribution of
agencies, the article then advances a nondeterministic understanding of data power and agency as relational,
partial, and provisional and enacted through the coconstitution of people, technologies, and discourses,
which might resonate with other examples of data activism and further urban data assemblages. These
findings add empirical weight to claims of empowerment made in the emerging fields of data activism and
data justice, and they raise further important questions for geographers and others interested in the ways in
which data are enrolled to enact grassroots politics, as well as the discursive–material dimensions of urban
technopolitics more generally. Key Words: data determinism, data imaginary, data justice, spatial justice,
technopolitics.

本文部署一个论述—物质分析架构, 用来追溯城市行动主义者的圈子如何建构相对于数据能力的数据权
力感知, 以推进草根政治目标。本分析通过将南非数据行动主义实践架构为一种技术政治的形式——一
个通过政治与技术在规范性论述中的定锚来凸显两者的共构关系之概念——指认数据如何被引用来具体
化空间不正义的草根政治论述, 但在与政府官员的争夺中, 数据作为草根政治权力的目标之脆弱性如何被
揭露。此一针对约翰内斯堡与开普敦的服务供给社会审计之经验研究, 显示政府如何有效地通过单独选
出量化数据作为弱的行动者, 利用其作为推进他们对于服务供给责任的自身政治论述之机会, 藉此反对调
查结果。通过揭露草根力量如何透过行动者的策略性重分布而最终受到强化, 本文推进对于数据权力与
行动者作为关系性、部分且暂时性的, 并且通过人们、技术与论述的共同组成进行的非决定性理解, 并可
能与其他数据行动主义案例和进一步的城市数据凑组产生共鸣。这些发现, 为浮现中的数据行动主义和
数据正义领域中的培力宣称增加经验的重量, 并进一步为地理学者和其他关心数据纳入来推动草根政治
的方式、以及更广泛的城市技术政治之论述—物质面向者, 提出重要的质疑。关键词：数据决定论, 数据
想像, 数据正义, 空间正义, 技术政治。

Este art
ıculo despliega un marco anal
ıtico discursivo–material para rastrear el origen del modo como son
construidas las percepciones del poder de los datos en c
ırculos activistas urbanos en contra de la capacidad
de los datos para promover metas pol
ıticas comunitarias. Enmarcando las pr
acticas sudafricanas del activismo
de datos como una forma de tecnopol
ıtica—un concepto que promueve la co-constituci
on de la pol
ıtica y la
tecnolog
ıa por medio de su anclaje a los discursos normativos—este an
alisis identifica el modo como se
inscriben los datos para sustanciar un discurso pol
ıtico b
asico de la injusticia espacial, pese a que la fragilidad
de los datos como objetos del poder pol
ıtico de base se revele por medio de su impugnaci
on por oficiales
gubernamentales. Este estudio emp
ırico de auditor
ıas sociales a la provisi
on de servicios en Johannesburgo y
Ciudad del Cabo muestra c
omo los gobiernos han resistido de manera efectiva sus hallazgos al sen ~ alar los
datos cuantitativos como un actor d
ebil, explotando esto como una oportunidad para promover su propio
discurso pol
ıtico sobre responsabilidad acerca de la provisi
on de servicio. Revelando c
omo el poder de base
fue eventualmente fortalecido a trav
es de la distribuci
on estrat
egica de agencias, el art
ıculo avanza enseguida
un entendimiento no determinista sobre el poder de los datos y de la agencia como relacional, parcial y

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 0(0) 2019, pp. 1–17 # 2019 by American Association of Geographers
Initial submission, November 2018; revised submission, May 2019; final acceptance, June 2019
Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
2 Cinnamon

provisional, y promulgados por medio de la co-constitucio
n de gente, tecnolog
ıas y discursos, lo cual podr
ıa
resonar con otros ejemplos del activismo de los datos y promover los ensamblajes de datos urbanos. Estos
descubrimientos agregan peso emp
ırico a demandas del empoderamiento logrado en los campos emergentes
del activismo de datos y de la justicia de datos, y plantean otros importantes interrogantes a los ge
ografos y
otros con inter
es en los modos como los datos son enrolados para promulgar pol
ıticas de base, lo mismo que
de manera m
as general las dimensiones discursivo–materiales de la tecnopol
ıtica urbana. Palabras clave:
determinismo de datos, imaginario de datos, justicia de datos, justicia espacial, tecnopol
ıtica.

Data has been constituted as an object vested with Kennedy 2018). In a move described as construct-
certain powers, influence, and rationalities. ing a “smart city from the bottom up” (Odendaal
—Ruppert, Isin, and Bigo (2017, 4) 2015), South African grassroots organizations in
search of political leverage are developing data-

T
he big data moment has revealed that data is
a powerful discourse, inflected with meanings
that are imagined, scripted, and circulated
through social, technological, and political practices
(Schrock 2017). Quantitative data big and small are
now discursively constructed as objects of significant
value and power (Ruppert, Isin, and Bigo 2017;
Shelton 2017), and governments and the private
sector are making huge investments motivated by an
increasingly normative belief in the capacity of data
for enabling strategic decision making and competi-
tive advantage. Municipal governments have been
especially influenced by globally circulating dis-
courses of big data and smart urbanism that link the
goals of sustainable, livable, and competitive urban
futures with the power of digital data and technology
(S€oderstr€
om, Paasche, and Klauser 2014; Wiig
2015). Data in particular are a key focus of smart
city ambitions, because, as Kitchin (2014b)
explained, they are viewed as neutral, objective, and
capable of “speaking an inherent truth about social and
economic relations” and are therefore “essential con-
stituent material to realising a smart city vision” (2–3,
italics added). But what happens when the data dis-
course is mobilized at the urban grassroots? This ar-
ticle traces how data are perceived in urban activist
circles in South Africa against their capacity to
advance grassroots political goals of spatial justice.
Grassroots organizations have also been drawn to
discourses that ascribe power and agency to data
(Kennedy, Poell, and van Dijck 2015; Kennedy and
Bates 2017), particularly through engagements in
data activism, which Milan and van der Velden
(2016) described as actions that seek to resist the
personal data accumulation activities of govern-
ments and corporations, as well as more proactive
production and appropriation of data for progressive
causes (see also Schrock 2016; Burns 2018;
driven approaches for substantiating geographic
inequities in infrastructure, services, and hazards.
Here, activists similarly view data as essential con-
stituent material for realizing a vision, although
here it is envisaged as essential for speaking an
inherent truth about spatial injustice in a country
subject to both the remainders of apartheid as well
as contemporary processes of development that
together produce highly uneven urban experiences.
Like their counterparts in municipal government,
South African civil society’s engagement with data
is based on a belief in “The Power of Data as
Evidence” (Social Justice Coalition 2013a); how-
ever, the extent to which data can be enrolled as
agents of grassroots political power, in South Africa
and elsewhere, is largely unresolved despite its cen-
trality to data activism and wider data justice
(Dencik, Hintz, and Cable 2016; Taylor 2017) ini-
tiatives. This research question is empirically exam-
ined through a case study of data activism by
grassroots organizations based in in Johannesburg
and Cape Town.
Based on an analysis of documents, participant
observation, and interviews with activists and gov-
ernment officials, this study followed the data pro-
duced by grassroots organizations as they were
enrolled to do political work for contesting spatial
disparities in service provision. This account builds
on a small number of studies examining social audit
data activism practices in South African cities
(Storey 2014; Mitchell and Odendaal 2015;
Odendaal 2015; Rossouw 2015; McFarlane and
Silver 2017). Social auditing is a process of commu-
nity-based monitoring of government spending and
service delivery consisting of two data-driven
phases, using access to information legislation to
acquire and analyze budget data and service provi-
sion standards, followed by community-based data
 Agency, Power, and Technopolitics in South African Data Activism
production to square expected service provision
with the reality at ground level. This study diverges
from previous work, however, in its analytical fore-
grounding of quantitative data as a discursive for-
mation and material actor in the wider data
activism community. Following Latour (2005), this
study exploits the innovative use of data activism
by grassroots organizations and their controversies
as an opening to examine the role of data as mater-
ial objects. Drawing on recent work in geography,
science and technology studies, and data studies,
this article examines the materiality and agency of
activist data against a backdrop of a particular
South African variety of technopolitical inquiry
(e.g., Edwards and Hecht 2010; Von Schnitzler
2016; Serlin 2017). This work reveals how politics
and technologies are coconstituted through their
anchoring to normative discourses that run deep in
South African society—including citizenship,
responsibility, rights, and justice. This discursive–
material analytical framework thus enables an inter-
pretation of technologies (including data) as “not
merely symbols or tools for political expression;
rather, technology itself becomes a political terrain
for the negotiation of moral-political questions”
(Von Schnitzler 2013, 671). A focus here on data
activism as a form of “bottom-up technopolitics”
(Gutierrez and Milan 2018) affords a glimpse into
the way that discourses that ascribe value, power,
and agency to data shape a belief that citizen
engagements with data can lead to the advance-
ment of grassroots political goals.
Drawing the concept of technopolitics into con-
versation with recent work on sociotechnical imagi-
naries (e.g., Donovan 2015; Jasanoff 2015; Bucher
2017; Sadowski and Bendor 2018), this account
reveals how data and data products (e.g., maps,
charts, statistics) are perceived by activists as power-
ful actors imbued with the agentic capacity to make
uneven delivery of basic services visible, incontro-
vertible, and actionable—and how, through contes-
tation and resistance by government officials, the
fragility of this data imaginary is rendered visible.
Through following social audit data as they are alter-
natively mobilized to advance competing political
discourses of spatial injustice and responsibility, this
article draws attention to the need to more carefully
attend to questions of power and agency in data
activism and data assemblages more broadly. This
argument is developed over four sections. First, a
3
brief background on recent developments in data
activism in South Africa is provided. Over the next
two sections, empirical evidence is presented to trace
the development of an activist data imaginary and
how this perception of what data are and what they
can do has been exploited by governments as an
opportunity to enact their own political goals. The
final section develops a theorization of data power
and agency to help explain the potential and limits
of data activism in this case study and makes a call
for closer attention to how agencies might be opti-
mally distributed among social, technological, and
political actors to more effectively enact grassroots
political goals through data activism. Overall, in
focusing on data’s “imagined affordances” (Nagy and
Neff 2015) and material capacities, this article illus-
trates how data activists’ attempts to make spatial
injustice visible through data has instead made vis-
ible the limitations of data as artifacts capable of
political action in and of themselves.
Data Activism in South Africa
Contemporary South Africa is notable for a
strongly activist civil society with roots in the anti-
apartheid resistance. A belief in “people power”
gained strength in the democratic era, galvanizing in
recent years around service delivery protests designed
to draw attention to inequities in the provision of
services guaranteed by the country’s rights-based
constitution, including education, health, housing,
water, and sanitation. A well-organized network of
civil society organizations has been successful in
heightening public awareness of uneven service
delivery, but these efforts often fail to achieve their
aims of equitable service provision. The frequent
sights and sounds of protest in South Africa’s “noisy
democracy”—from peaceful gatherings to street
blockades—can easily be ignored or discredited by
government officials in a country sometimes referred
to as the protest capital of the world. The rise in
people power activism has been linked to the limita-
tions of the mid-1990s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC). Although the TRC was set up
as a mechanism to account for apartheid-era injus-
tices, focusing on high-profile human rights viola-
tions including political violence and murder served
to overlook the everyday structural violence and
uneven standards of living of the democratic era
(Robins 2014). As Robins (2014) articulated, “It is
4 Cinnamon
precisely the gaps in these transitional justice
approaches that have necessitated the emergence of
new forms of social activism” (481, italics added).
Data activism has arisen in this context as a partial
pivot away from grassroots struggle driven by human
agency in the form of people power to a focus on
technological agency driven by data power (Kennedy
and Moss 2015). Inherent to data activism is the
notion that data can produce “new forms of power
relations and politics” (Ruppert, Isin, and Bigo 2017,
2, italics added), and so data activism is frequently
mobilized in support of social justice aims (Kennedy
2018). In the South African context, social injustice
is often understood in specifically spatial terms;
indeed, spatial injustice, a term normally confined to
academic human geography and allied disciplines, is
widely circulated in South Africa by media, activists,
and civil society organizations to draw attention to
the ways in which persistent socioeconomic and
racial inequalities are fundamentally geographically
patterned (e.g., Achmat 2014). South African forms
of data activism are thus largely designed to “make
visible” (Odendaal 2006) issues of spatial injustice in
urban informal settlements, spaces that are typically
underrepresented in official data sources such as cen-
sus or mapping databases and thus newly subject to
datafication, the “process of rendering into data
aspects of the world not previously quantified”
(Kennedy, Poell, and van Dijck 2015, 1).
Datafication has therefore emerged as a process by
which spatial injustice might be made visible, incon-
trovertible, and actionable in a country subject to a
complex politics of visibility in which one must be
“seen by the state before benefitting from it”
(Parnell and Pieterse 2010, 153).
Arriving via a longer history in India, South
African grassroots organizations are now undertaking
social audits, a form of data activism described as a
“community-led process that facilitates public par-
ticipation in the monitoring of government service
delivery and expenditure” (Social Justice Coalition,
Ndifuna Ukwazi, and International Budget
Partnership 2015). Although the methods and sub-
stantive topics vary, most efforts aim to highlight
gaps between budgeted allocation of services and the
reality on the ground. Two forms of data activism
are generally required to achieve this aim, right-to-
information (RTI) advocacy and community-based
data production. Social audits make use of the
Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) to
access and evaluate budget expenditure and service
delivery data held by governments or the private
sector, which aims to put communities and grassroots
organizations “in a better position to approach gov-
ernment and voice their concerns” (Jooste and
Tshangana 2012, 1). Once documents are received
and analyzed,1 a second form of data activism is
undertaken based on the coproduction of primary
data. Using paper or digital data collection tools,
local residents are trained to conduct surveys and to
record the location, quality, and maintenance of
infrastructure and services as quantitative data for
the production of statistics, maps, and data visualiza-
tions. This step in the social audit is designed to
address data gaps left by official government data
production regimes or to produce “counterdata” to
contest official data sources and what is believed to
be their partial or inaccurate representations of real-
ity (Currie et al. 2016; Dalton, Taylor, and
Thatcher 2016).
South Africa’s first social audit was conducted in
2013 on communal chemical toilets in several infor-
mal settlements in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, by the
Social Justice Coalition and community members
with assistance from other activist organizations. At
a public hearing, findings presented to the wider
community and local government identified signifi-
cant shortcomings in the provision of toilets by the
company contracted to provide this service—many
broken or unusable toilets, limited cleaning and
maintenance, and a much higher family-to-toilet
ratio than the one-to-five guideline (Social Justice
Coalition 2013b). In revealing the private contrac-
tor’s abdication of its contractual obligations and the
City of Cape Town’s lack of oversight, the social
audit drew significant attention to this data-driven
approach for substantiating service delivery injustices
and human rights violations. Several other civil soci-
ety organizations have since undertaken their own
social audits on a wide range of service delivery
issues in informal settlements in and near Cape
Town and Johannesburg and more recently in poor
rural areas in KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape
Provinces (see Figure 1). For most social audits,
however, government officials have responded by
dismissing and even forcefully disputing the findings.
Developed in part to strengthen their position
against government resistance, the South African
Social Audit Network (http://socialaudits.org.za/)
was formed in 2016 as an alliance of organizations
 Agency, Power, and Technopolitics in South African Data Activism 5

Figure 1. Social audits in South Africa. Over a dozen social audits were undertaken between 2013 and 2018. In Cape Town
Metropolitan Municipality, four were conducted in informal settlements in Khayelitsha (sanitation/toilets/refuse removal) by the Social
Justice Coalition and partners and one in Wolwerivier (housing) by Ndifuna Ukwazi. Planact conducted audits in two informal
settlements in Gauteng, Wattville, and Thembelihle (sanitation/toilets) and one in Mpumalanga, Spring Valley (water). Equal Education
undertook two province-wide school audits in Gauteng and Western Cape, and recently two audits were undertaken in rural
communities, in Mpukonyoni (mining impacts by Actionaid in KwaZulu-Natal) and Glenmore (sports infrastructure by Afesis-corplan in
Eastern Cape).

aiming to advance social audits “as a legitimate and
effective form of community based monitoring and
participation tool” (Social Audit Network 2016,
italics added). A belief in data’s legitimacy and
effectiveness for advancing grassroots political goals
is a basic motivation not only for social audits in
South Africa but for data activism efforts more gen-
erally; whether this ideal has a basis in the outcomes
of data activism actions is the question that the ar-
ticle takes up over the following two sections.
6 Cinnamon
Technopolitics, Data Imaginaries, and the
Discourse of Spatial Injustice
Critical inquiry in the era of big data has galva-
nized an understanding of data not as “raw” inputs
in the production of information and knowledge but
as material technologies with the capacity to act in
the world (Wilson 2011; Gitelman 2013; Kitchin
2014a), and so it can be productive to consider data
activism as a form of technopolitics (Calzada 2017;
Gutierrez and Milan 2018). This analysis deploys
Hecht’s (2009) definition of technopolitics, “the stra-
tegic practice of designing or using technology to
constitute, embody, or enact political goals” (15),
based on an understanding of technology as “artifacts
as well as nonphysical, systematic methods of making
or doing things.” Following Star (2010), the materi-
ality of data derives not from “a sense of prefabri-
cated stuff or ‘thing’-ness” (603) but from the effects
and impacts of their production and circulation. A
technopolitical framing has been applied to grand
technological and political projects such as nuclear
power (Edwards and Hecht 2010) and hydroelectric
dams (Sneddon and Fox 2011), as well as more
abstract technologies such as the environmental
footprint (Freidberg 2014). In South Africa, techno-
politics specifically draws attention to the ways
in which this hybridization unfolds when techno-
logical artifacts and political practices are interwo-
ven and mobilized to advance historical and
contemporary sociopolitical discourses (see
Breckenridge 2008; Von Schnitzler 2008; Edwards
and Hecht 2010; Von Schnitzler 2013; Breckenridge
2014; Donovan 2015; Serlin 2017). For example,
Von Schnitzler (2016) followed the installation of
prepaid water meters in Soweto, Johannesburg, dem-
onstrating how key political discourses in South
Africa are often productively understood as techno-
political. The author revealed how this seemingly
apolitical, everyday technological object produces
particular forms of responsibilized citizenship and
market-oriented subjectivities in a neoliberalizing
state intent on recovering costs for water provision.
Reversing directions, this study deploys a “bottom-up
technopolitics” (Gutierrez and Milan 2018) framing
to trace how activists in South Africa attempt to
mobilize a grassroots political discourse of spatial
injustice through data-driven actions.
Like Donovan’s (2015) analysis of how diverse
stakeholders share a common regard for biometric
technologies in South African society, this study
shows how various organizations engaging in data
activism do so via a particular, collective understand-
ing of what data are and what they can do—a data
imaginary that posits data as “necessary, suitable and
effective” (817) for exposing injustice and informing
equitable service delivery (see also Beer 2019). In an
example from the emerging literature on data activ-
ism, Baack (2018), drawing on Nagy and Neff
(2015), explored the “imagined affordances of data”
by civic technology activists, revealing how the work
they do is a function not only of their features or
properties but also of how they are perceived by data
activists. This illustrates that the boundary-setting
work of establishing imaginaries in the consciousness
of collectives is the domain not only of traditionally
powerful groups such as states and corporations but
also of grassroots actors (see also Jasanoff 2015;
Sadowski and Bendor 2018). Jasanoff’s (2015) con-
cept of sociotechnical imaginaries provides some
guidance here—defined as “collectively held, institu-
tionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of
desirable futures, animated by shared understandings
of forms of social life and social order attainable
through, and supportive of, advances in science and
technology” (4)—because it draws discourse down
from language and perception to the plane of action
and materialization through technology. Aligning
these ideas on perception with research on technopo-
litics, the discussion that follows reveals three core
characteristics of an activist data imaginary in South
Africa: (1) Quantitative evidence is central to con-
temporary forms of policymaking and governance;
(2) data are inherently powerful mediators of action
and can be harnessed for empowering the grassroots;
and (3) data can stabilize productive relationships
between oppositional stakeholders. An op-ed piece
by activists in South Africa illustrates this data
imaginary, which is further explained
Even though each person is the expert on the
conditions of their own life, governments all around the
world routinely perceive working class communities as
the least credible source of information on the services
they receive. … One of the most important functions
of social audits is to break this dynamic by forcing
government into a direct discussion with communities.
The audits do this by serving as a methodology for
communities to document an issue they want addressed
in a format that governments are more likely to find
credible, like data tables, excel spreadsheet, and reports.
(Bradlow and Swartbooi 2016)
 Agency, Power, and Technopolitics in South African Data Activism
Data activism is pursued as a “credible” strategy to
add weight to struggles for service delivery, as a way
to situate demands on a rational and scientific plane
rather than the emotional or adversarial levels of
“people power.” As one interviewee put it, “It is not
just the people power activism, it’s backed up by us
knowing what we are talking about … because then
when the arguments come out against what we are
saying, we can say well you’re actually wrong, there is
scientific evidence here” (activist organization, Cape
Town, April 2017). Such an approach engages the
notion that governance decisions require quantitative
evidence—we have had to “learn the language,” as
one interviewee put it (civil society organization,
Cape Town, April 2017). As another explained, “It’s
very important when working with government to
work with facts, you know” (civil society organization,
Johannesburg, September 2017).
As the preceding op-ed quote illustrates, activists
frequently invoke the agentic power of social audit
data to enact grassroots political goals—they “force”
governments to pay attention. Data are imagined by
activists as possessing technicity, generally understood
as the capacity of technology to act in and affect the
world (Kitchin and Dodge 2011; cf. Ash 2012), a
notion advanced more widely in the age of big data,
that data can speak for themselves (see Anderson
2008; Barnes 2013). As Kitchin (2014b) put it in
the context of smart city discourses, “Data are seen
as providing objective, neutral measures that are free
of political ideology as to what is occurring in a city,
with the weight of data speaking an inherent truth about
social and economic relations and thus providing
robust empirical evidence for policy and practice”
(2, italics added). Global smart urbanism discourses
have helped to cement the notion that data are key
to effective urban governance, and in South African
cities data-driven urbanism is now a central pillar of
smart city plans. As Patricia de Lille, the recent
mayor of Cape Town, remarked in the context of
that city’s ambitions to be Africa’s first digital city,
“the City will be driven by data and evidence, focus-
ing relentlessly on our customers: the people of Cape
Town” (Accelerate Cape Town 2016). Data activism
reflects and reproduces these hegemonic data dis-
courses; indeed, many of the reports produced for
social audits could be mistaken for official planning
documents produced by a technocratically minded
municipal government. For example, the reports
from Equal Education’s social audits on school
7
infrastructure, sanitation, and safety in Gauteng and
Western Cape provinces are each hundreds of pages
in length, including findings presented as maps,
graphs, descriptive statistics, and textual interpre-
tation, as well as dozens of pages of unanalyzed
numerical data, quantitative survey responses, and
secondary statistics on crime and social issues (Equal
Education 2015, 2016).
Social audits are effectively an attempt to leverage
the discursive force of data power to shake up exist-
ing asymmetries that disempower those who do not
produce, accumulate, and control data (see Taylor
and Broeders 2015). As one activist at a public
event in Cape Town described, “Social audits are
about power … about the power of the commun-
ities themselves taking [government] power away.”
Although community-based projects often cite the
process of engagement, activists also pointed to data
outputs as key agents of empowerment in social
audits. As an interviewee explained, “I’ve seen [com-
munity members at public hearings] become very
bold, you know, to be able to ask questions [of gov-
ernment], and relevant questions for that matter,
because they’ve interacted with information” (social
audit organization, Johannesburg, September 2017).
Activists pursue data as an empowering force, but
key to that ambition is also a pragmatic understand-
ing of their own role as development actors in asso-
ciation with government and other stakeholders.
Social audits are fundamentally about challenging
service delivery failures; however, the social audit
community in South Africa is also keen for its
efforts to be seen as helpful; as one interviewee put
it, “With social audits you are no longer complain-
ing, you are giving them their facts back” (activist
organization, Johannesburg, September 2017).
Another interviewee explained the twofold ambi-
tions of social audits:
We want to hold the government to account, and in
that process build a relationship with the government,
to make the job of the government easy. [So we
collect data so that we can say], “Here is what is
happening on the ground, you need to prioritize this,
stop prioritizing that,” but sometime people miss that
point. (Civil society organization, Johannesburg,
September 2017)
This illustrates how activists perceive data not only
as mediators of action but also more specifically as
boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989) that
might stabilize cooperative associations between
8 Cinnamon
diverse and often adversarial actors. As noted in the
op-ed earlier, social audit data are viewed as essential
in compelling governments into direct discussion
with communities. A collaborative relationship with
governments is a frequent strategy in the “mix of
confrontation and cooperation” often deployed by
South African civil society organizations in their
efforts to influence urban governance (B
enit-Gbaffou
2015a, 9). Data, explicitly, are perceived as the
means by which communities and local government
can meet and make progress on service delivery even
if there is no consensus on how best to achieve it.
As a data activist explained:
You need to find some common ground and actually
data’s a pretty good common ground because it mostly
sort of stands on its own. There’s still interpretation,
but it mostly stands on its own. (Civil society
organization, Cape Town, April 2017)
This illustrates an understanding of quantitative data
as largely free from subjectivity and bias and there-
fore useful for enabling dialogical conversations and
collaboration across different stakeholder groups.
This section sketches out the contours of an
activist data imaginary, which, like wider data dis-
courses, envisions data as key to decision making
and societal advancement, as an object of power and
agency, and as impartial, value-free representations
on which to develop cooperative collaborations. Yet,
the recent history of data activism in South Africa
suggests that the data imaginary on which local
forms of data activism are constructed is based on
perceptions of data that might not always align with
reality. This is not to say that these perceptions are
a “false belief or fetish” but, instead, the notion of a
data imaginary is deployed here as a conceptual
device for thinking about how data are understood
by activists and what these perceptions enable
(Bucher 2017, 31). Paying attention to the way in
which data are perceived by activists is critically
important for data activism as a practice and as a
field of inquiry, because “discursive constructions of
data have material consequences in terms of what
becomes possible to build, to imagine or to utilize”
(Thornham and G
omez Cruz 2016, 5). Shifting now
from idealism to materialism, the article turns to the
task of tracing the material capacities of activist
data, revealing considerable distance between their
imagined affordances and the work they can actually
do for activists.
Resistance, Data Destabilization, and the
Discourse of Responsibility
Technopolitics proposes a “deep, complex and
non-instrumental conception of the relation between
technology and politics” (Trer
e and Carretero 2018,
53). Central to the concept then is the idea that
political positions attached to and enrolled through
technologies are mutable (Kurban, Pen ~a-L
opez, and
Haberer 2017); it accounts for the “ability of com-
peting actors to envision and enact political goals
through the support of technical artifacts”
(Gagliardone 2014, 3). This framing therefore draws
attention to the contestable and potentially unstable
character of data as material objects designed to
advance political goals. Activists have invested in
data to give weight to a discourse of spatial injustice,
but for most social audits conducted in South
Africa governments have aggressively disputed find-
ings and used this as an opening to shift blame to
the communities themselves. The fragility of data as
a technology for advancing grassroots political goals
is laid bare in the way government officials made
data the focus of their resistance. In many social
audits, quantitative data are supplemented with
experiential accounts and personal testimonies, yet,
as one activist noted, most governments chose to
“attack the data” (Rossouw 2015, 3, italics added).
This illustrates how both activists and governments
understand data as material actors with the power to
enact political goals. Although activists view data as
an actor with inherent power for strengthening a
grassroots discourse of spatial injustice, government
departments instead understand social audit data as
an inevitably weak actor that can be exploited to
advance a different discourse altogether, as explained
here. Both stability and fragility can be coexisting
properties of technologies and each can be enrolled
to enact alternative or competing political goals
(Denis and Pontille 2015).
Social audit findings generally point to some com-
bination of negligence, maladministration, incompe-
tence, or corruption, so it is unsurprising that
governments have disputed their claims. Almost uni-
versally, government officials have dismissed findings
by making claims about the inadequacy of the data
as a true representation of service delivery. A
response to the Equal Education schools social audit
by the Western Cape provincial minister of educa-
tion is indicative of how governments have
 Agency, Power, and Technopolitics in South African Data Activism
responded to data activism. This social audit high-
lighted missing and unsafe infrastructure as well as
corporal punishment and instances of sexual assault,
but the minister deflected attention away from the
substantive issues by attacking the data, in a lengthy
rebuttal published online (Sch€afer 2016):
There are crucial errors contained in the methodology
of this audit. By their very nature, social audits rely on
convenience sampling and/or purposive sampling. Both
sampling methods are not scientific and there is no
systemic way of applying the findings beyond the areas
in which they are found. Consequently such studies do
not have the potential to inform policy.
This social audit was conducted in 15 percent of
schools carefully chosen from across urban and rural
Western Cape to account for diverse socioeconomic
and developmental contexts. The methodology was
developed with support from experienced partner
organizations and was refined and pilot tested by
trained participants. Independent South African and
international researchers peer-reviewed the report.
Yet, the highly troubling findings were readily dis-
missed, downgraded from the plane of the technopo-
litical to a purely technical register by invoking
questions of statistical power as a means to nullify
the grassroots power that data activists perceive to
be embodied in their data. Data as a technology for
advancing grassroots political goals should be under-
stood as unstable, open to contestation and trans-
formation, as a contingency open to disassembly or
even reassembly to support other political projects
(Von Schnitzler 2013). The ability of technologies
to function as intended matters if they are enrolled
to do political work—indeed, this will ultimately
determine their political effectiveness (Hecht 2001),
an important point for data activism more generally.
The “attack the data” strategy has been an effec-
tive destabilizing strategy—in most social audits con-
ducted in South Africa it has enabled government
officials to disrupt attempts by activists to reconfig-
ure power relations and strengthen a discourse of
spatial injustice. Doing so has created an opening for
governments to inject their own political goals into
conversations around social audits, specifically, to
strengthen a discourse of responsibility around ser-
vice delivery. The government official’s public
response to the Equal Education Western Cape
schools social audit illustrates this move
(Sch€afer 2016):
9
If it is unfair to blame children, then it is equally
unfair to blame the education department for social
issues that need to be dealt with across the board by
numerous role-players in national, provincial, and local
spheres of government. The role of parents must also
be highlighted. There are still far too many parents
who neglect their parental responsibilities. Perhaps
Equal Education could launch a parent responsibility
campaign across the country to impress on parents the
important role they play in creating the kind of culture
that we all want to see.
Pivoting the discourse around uneven service deliv-
ery—from injustice to responsibility—has been
effective in part because it is a familiar moral lan-
guage. Cutting across socioeconomic, racial, and
ideological divides, South African political and
social life is heavily inflected with a broadly recog-
nized belief that rights of citizenship are actively per-
formed (Miraftab and Wills 2005; Storey 2014).
Citizen participation and responsibility are colored
by “neoliberal impulses” (Staeheli and Hammett
2013, 39) permeating all levels of government, but a
neoliberal framing of social audits provides only a
partial and limited account of why governments
have so effectively recast uneven service delivery as
an issue of responsibility. A hallmark of South
African society is a distinctive approach to participa-
tory governance born out of the antiapartheid resist-
ance, strengthened through grassroots community
organizations, and formalized in the 1955 Freedom
Charter and the 1996 rights-based Constitution
(B
enit-Gbaffou 2015b). These national discourses
are widespread, although amplified in poor townships
and informal settlements by the “visible absence” of
state-provided infrastructure and services (Super
2016). To some extent marginalized communities
have felt a sense of empowerment through voluntary
community-led actions. As Parnell and Robinson
(2012) explained in their critique of the neoliberal
framing of postapartheid urban politics in South
Africa, uneven state involvement in development
and reconstruction has actually been seen as import-
ant for marginalized communities and civil society
organizations, enabling them to “draw on their own
insights and capacities to do more for themselves to
end poverty” (603).
South African forms of data activism thus emerge
out of a particular context in which a sense of duty
and a desire to “capacitate” marginalized commu-
nities are also important motivations for activists,
beyond the advancement of specific political goals.
10 Cinnamon
Some participants even envisioned that social audits
could play a part in advancing municipal govern-
ment smart city ambitions. Speaking about the social
audit by the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) that pro-
duced detailed maps and statistics on sanitation
infrastructure in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, one inter-
viewee remarked, “Look at what the SJC did in the
city of Cape Town, if I was in the city I would just
be so happy!” (activist organization, Johannesburg,
April 2017). A willingness by activists to contribute
to the development of “smart cities from the bottom
up” (Odendaal 2015) evokes Vanolo’s (2014) notion
of “smartmentality,” a disciplinary strategy enacted
through a discourse of smartness that can empower
citizens as well as nudge them toward taking respon-
sibility for the construction of smart cities. In the
South African context, however, discipline and
empowerment are neither oppositional nor exclusive
forces; rather, they are closely interwoven through
the “reciprocal dynamics” (Ruiters 2007, 487) of
deliberative or agonistic forms of government–grass-
roots interaction. In the case of data-driven interac-
tions, the modus operandi of government officials
has been to target the data as a weak grassroots po-
litical actor; however, more recent engagements sug-
gest an increasing recognition of the potential of
grassroots data production, as shown through the
2017 collaborative sanitation social audit in
Wattville near Johannesburg (Planact 2017).
Findings coproduced between government, civil soci-
ety, and local communities directly informed service
delivery improvements; however, the stabilization of
social audit data in this example might have less to
do with perceptions of data quality and more to do
with the local government’s willingness to engage
with civil society organizations. The Wattville social
audit was initiated by a ward councilor who recog-
nized on one hand the government’s inability to
monitor and account for sanitation provision in this
area and, on the other, the potential of grassroots
actors to fill data gaps.
This recognition is revealing of a more broadly
experienced lack of data capacity in South Africa at
various levels of governance. Although many South
African municipalities are actively touting ambitions
to be smart cities in the globally circulating model,
this rhetoric belies a reality of often weak or frag-
mented digital policies and data infrastructures that
constrain the possibility of data-driven governance
(Singh 2010). Data gaps and structural challenges
are compounded in South Africa by a “culture of
poor record-keeping” in the public service (The
Archival Platform 2015, 165; also Ngoepe and
Ngulube 2013) and a hesitancy to share data resour-
ces between government departments and levels.
When data are produced in the public sector, it is
often done to satisfy a “culture of reporting” (Garrib
et al. 2008) rather than for use in quality improve-
ment or strategic decision making. An employee of
an urban research organization in Johannesburg
summed up the discrepancy between smart city aspi-
rations and the reality of the country’s capacity for
data-led governance:
Often data doesn’t exist, or it is guessed. If the data
does exist it is generated purely to fill in national
indicator spreadsheets, to satisfy national M&E
[monitoring and evaluation] systems … local
government duly shoves it into the data sausage
machine as it goes up, but the data isn’t accessible
back to them again. (interview, Johannesburg,
April 2017)
New data production assemblages involving local
and civil society actors thus present an opportunity
that might be more productively engaged with to
advance data-driven governance ambitions.
Grassroots actors should be cautious, however, not
only because of the widely documented examples of
digital exploitation but also because of the more
general limitations of data as a form of representa-
tion. Data activism risks oversimplifying lived real-
ities if experience, detail, and nuance are discarded
and, as Barnes (2013) put it, “the numbers are the
story” (300). This can be alienating for those who
experience injustice in its full texture. Drawing on
experiences of presenting quantitative social audit
findings to the City of Cape Town, Rossouw (2015)
explained the potential harms of mobilizing data to
substantiate service delivery injustice:
The repetition of finding after finding, in the format
and language that we had followed, with statistics,
percentages and fractions, although legible to City
officials, was disconnected from the majority of
residents at the public hearing who simply could not
relate and feel, “Yes, that represents me and my
experience too.” (82)
Another limitation of quantitative data is illustrated
by recent smart cities research that reveals how the
push for technocratic data-driven “solutions” to
urban governance issues is often disconnected from
 Agency, Power, and Technopolitics in South African Data Activism
the bigger picture (e.g., Datta 2015; Cardullo and
Kitchin 2018), a caution that is also pertinent for
grassroots urban data activism initiatives. For social
audits, the focus on comparing expected service pro-
vision to on-the-ground reality suggests that data
activism might lend itself more to substantiating
downstream effects than addressing overarching
causal factors—which in this context is the inter-
action of contemporary socioeconomic inequality
with the legacy of apartheid spatial planning. Given
these limitations, it is important to consider whether
datafication can shoulder the burden of a larger pol-
itics or whether it can serve to mask the social and
political struggles it has been mobilized to advance
(Ruppert, Isin, and Bigo 2017). The findings of this
study question the notion that grassroots political
goals can be advanced through data, but there is a
need for further evidence that weighs the datafica-
tion of injustice against other ways of knowing, rep-
resenting, and challenging it.
This section exposes a sizable gap between the
imagined affordances of data and the South African
experience of grassroots data activism. There is a res-
onance here with other data activisms; for instance,
Thornham and G
omez Cruz (2016) identified in
activist “hacking” events “a real disjuncture between
the way data is discursively constructed, and the way
data is variously and unevenly operationalized in the
material and embodied processes of the events
themselves” (1). Activists’ attempts to substantiate a
discourse of spatial injustice through data have been
exploited by governments as an opportunity to
strengthen a discourse of responsibility for uneven
service delivery. Data are imagined by activists as
powerful actors imbued with the capacity to make
uneven service delivery visible, incontrovertible, and
actionable—yet, through aggressive resistance by
government officials, the fragility of this data
imaginary is rendered visible. Data can be highly
volatile when enrolled as technopolitical artifacts:
“Once they leave their makers, they can be retooled
for other ethical and political projects and reima-
gined to do work within a multiplicity of formations”
(Von Schnitzler 2016, 10). Although most social
audits have not realized their specific goals, some
have succeeded in drawing considerable attention
from the media and the public to the issues and the
data-driven approach (e.g., Schaver 2016). Over
time, wider attention might be converted into suffi-
cient leverage to force governments to take data
11
activism seriously, despite the limited power of data
alone to enact these political goals. In this sense,
this demonstrates how imaginaries can be productive
even if they are not particularly grounded in reality
(Donovan 2015). Yet, the extent to which data can
be enrolled to advance grassroots power is a central
question that the emerging fields of data activism
and data justice must more carefully consider. In par-
ticular, the findings here suggest a need to pay closer
attention to how power and agency operate within
data activism assemblages, which the article now
turns to in the final section.
Locating Power and Agency in Data
Activism, or Enacting the Discourse of
Apartheid Legacies
Reflecting on the big data moment in which asym-
metrical data accumulation and analysis by govern-
ments and private corporations poses a threat to
human agency and free will, a number of commenta-
tors have called for greater attention to enhancing
the public’s capacity to act through datafication
(Couldry and Powell 2014; Kennedy, Poell, and van
Dijck 2015; Cinnamon 2017). Data activism, it is
argued, “offers citizens the opportunity to exercise
their democratic agency in the age of datafication”
(Gutierrez and Milan 2018, 96). Yet, nascent research
on data activism has yet to carefully attend to the
nature of power and agency in data assemblages, and
most work only passively speculates how data might
advance the political goals of grassroots actors despite
agency being implicit in the basic rationale for data
activism (Kennedy 2018). Like Milan and Van der
Velden (2016) posited, the analysis presented here
suggests a need for a more detailed account of agency
in data activism—“to consider anew the location and
nature of capacities for agency” (Coole and Frost
2010, 9)—as grassroots political goals become increas-
ingly subject to datafication.
Although datafication is usually described as a
process of making quantifiable the previously
unquantified, it is also productively understood as an
ideology based on an instrumentalist logic that a
world newly represented as data will enact advance-
ments in research, industry, and governance (see van
Dijck 2014). Implicit in this ideology is a belief in
the capacity of data to act in the world, and so spe-
cifically engaging data as a material actor can help
12 Cinnamon
to explain the agentic capacity of data as they are
enrolled toward activism goals. There has been lim-
ited attention to nonhuman agencies in data activ-
ism, but analyses of technopolitical assemblages
more broadly have produced diverse accounts of the
nature and distribution of power and agency.
Breckenridge’s (2005, 2014) work on biometric data-
bases in South Africa reveals how local public offi-
cials’ capacities to act have been supplanted by the
technology’s affordances and constraints embedded
at national government level, “at the cost of individ-
ual citizens’ control over their own identities and
the bureaucracy’s capacity to mediate” (Breckenridge
2005, 281). Garrett and Edwards’ (2007) research
on an antiapartheid communication systems revealed
an unstable agency shaped through technical affor-
dances, user practices and capabilities, and organiza-
tional routines. The analysis of South African data
activism in this study also suggests an account of
agency that is unstable and dispersed within a shift-
ing assemblage of human, technological, and polit-
ical actors but that extant power relations strongly
influence any agent’s capacity for action. Research
in “new materialisms” is relevant here because it
draws attention to the complex ways that agency is
distributed between human and nonhuman actors.
Calling for a shift in focus on agency as a property
of an individuated actor to the notion of distributed
“agentic capacities,” Coole (2013, 458) explained
how we must pay attention to “the contingent
appearing (or not) of capacities for agency within
any particular field of forces.” Although technicity is
generally understood as the agency of technologies
within a human–nonhuman assemblage and remains
a highly useful explanation here, a more specific
interpretation of the concept provides a way of
thinking about how human, technological, and polit-
ical actors are not only capable of acting in the
world but how their actions are interconnected with
the agencies and materialities of other actors, as
explained by Kinsley (2014):
We can [also] think of technicity as the ways in which
humans and technology mutually co-constitute one
another in an ongoing formulation of associative
milieus. The reciprocal arrangement does not have the
human at its centre but is a transduction, whereby the
human and technical individuals concretize in relation.
Technicity in this sense is not a capacity but a form of
relation through which we come to understand our
technical “supports” and ourselves, and somewhat
dissolves that distinction. (372)
Bennett’s (2004, 2009) work on political material-
ities is helpful for conceptualizing data power within
data activism as a relational outcome of distributed
agentic capacities. In particular, her concept of
thing-power is useful because it provides a means for
thinking about the way technological artifacts such
as social audit data are “made to act” (Latour 2005),
because “a material body always resides within some
assemblage or other, and its thing-power is a function
of that grouping” (Bennett 2004, 354). Here, the ca-
pacity of data to enact political goals can be under-
stood as dependent on power relations between
actors, which helps to explain a general failure of
social audits to strengthen the discourse of spatial
injustice yet how they were reassembled to advance
the discourse of responsibility. In this case, the
thing-power of activist data points to a notion of
agency not only as being distributed among actors
but also as a constituent property or character of the
overall assemblage (Callon 1991; Bennett 2004).2
This is not to say that data as material objects are
necessarily purely instrumentalized matter—that is,
tools for enacting human agency—but rather that
each data assemblage might contain actors mobilized
through both independent and composite agencies
and that these can change (Bennett 2009;
McFarlane 2011).
Empirical studies of data activism practices could
be informed by the growing literature on digital
materialities that specifically engages these ideas. For
instance, Neff and Nagy’s (2016) “symbiotic agency”
and Rose’s (2017) “posthuman agency” are relevant
for data activism, in that they specifically draw these
versions of materialist thinking into conversation
with debates about power and agency in the context
of emerging forms of digital data and technology.
These concepts could provide a way of thinking
about agency within technopolitical assemblages as a
proxy, symbiosis, or coproduction of various actors’
intentions and capacities, rather than something
that is inherent to any individual human, techno-
logical, or political actor (see also Zook and
Blankenship 2018).
Framing data activism as fundamentally technopo-
litical, I argue that it might be productive to expli-
citly conceptualize data power and agency as
relational, partial, and provisional, and enacted “by
virtue of its operating in conjunction with other
things” (Bennett 2004, 354); in this case, within an
assemblage of people (activists, local residents,
 Agency, Power, and Technopolitics in South African Data Activism
government officials), technologies (data, statistics,
maps, graphs), and political discourses (injustice,
responsibility) that are mutually coconstituted and
irreducible. This account runs counter to the deter-
ministic thinking underlying not only some data
activisms but also other technopolitical assemblages
that perceive social and political change to be inher-
ent properties of technology. Such data determinism
posits that data produced for progressive causes are
intrinsically powerful for grassroots action, rather
than, as illustrated in this study, a product of the
coming together of particular social, political, and
technological capacities (cf. Srinivasan, Finn, and
Ames 2017). The analysis presented here sheds light
on some potential limitations of data activism more
generally when data are considered powerful individ-
uated actors, a notion central to wider big data and
smart city discourses, as well as in significant swathes
of the recent literature on digital society and data-
driven urbanism, which often emphasizes techno-
logical over human agency within sociotechnical
assemblages (see Rose 2017).
Emerging postsocial audit versions of data activ-
ism in South Africa, effectively through trial and
error, have come to the conclusion that data them-
selves do not exercise power but rather that they
may be “afforded power by a network of con-
tingencies” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 40, italics
added). Several activists explained how a strategic
redistribution of agencies has enhanced grassroots
power. As one interviewee put it, “I would never go
head to head with a government on data again
because to me it’s not what wins the battle. What
wins the battle is better understanding power and
your leverage over them” (activist organization,
Cape Town, September 2017). For this activist, a
more effective approach for strengthening grassroots
power has been to leverage yet another, highly
potent South African political discourse—apartheid
legacies—as the primary agentic force, which is
interwoven with, though not driven by, data power:
The game we are [now] playing is “you are just like the
apartheid government.” They forcefully removed and
you are doing the same. And, there is a resonance there
with history and with perception, that is a discourse
that is very powerful to be tapping into. And that
scares them so much more than anything else, because
nobody wants to be associated with that history. …
We do still use data … but we’re not going to play a
public war on the data, because we won’t win that.
13
Speaking about emerging forms of housing activism
in Cape Town, this activist explained how data are
still perceived in his organization as important to
the activism process but that any capacity for action
inherent in data is weak compared with the actions
possible by invoking a growing sentiment that con-
temporary governance decisions strikingly resemble
those of the apartheid regime. Grassroots power, for
this activist, is mobilized by a moral–political dis-
course that is augmented by data and made action-
able through the legal system, a carefully arranged
entanglement of social, political, and technological
agencies. As a key finding of this study, this suggests
that the distribution of agentic capacities between
human, technological, and political actors must be a
core consideration for those engaging in data activ-
ism. As Von Schnitzler (2013) argued, realizing
power in technopolitical assemblages requires careful
consideration of how agencies should be distributed.
Conclusion
Over the past half-decade, the initial excitement
around social audits has been somewhat supplanted
by a more realistic understanding of how data might
be deployed to reveal and take action on the spatial
injustices of everyday life in South Africa. In effect,
activists have taken an evidence-based approach to
assess the effectiveness of social audits—rooted in
their own experiences of conducting them—and con-
cluded that evidence alone, in the form of quantita-
tive data, does not shift power. This outcome—a shift
in perception of what data are and what they can
do—reveals a slippage between activist aims of mak-
ing spatial injustice visible and actionable through
data and what is generally possible through any singu-
lar action targeting injustice. This aligns with
Barnett’s (2018) argument, which draws attention to
how any potential shift from spatial injustice to just-
ice is not achieved through purely epistemological
practices but rather that “[t]he geographies of justice
emerge through the combination of spaces of mobil-
ization and agitation, deliberation and compromise,
bargaining and deal making, decision and delivery,
[and] accountability and revision” (325).
A discursive–material lens affords an insight into
the political possibilities of data when the normativ-
ity of the imagination meets the materiality of the
assemblage (Jasanoff 2015). In empirically fore-
grounding data through a technopolitical lens, this
14 Cinnamon
analysis adds insight to emerging understandings of
data power and data justice. As the analysis shows,
the capacity of data to enact political goals and
attain justice for the grassroots might be contingent
on the specific distribution of agentic capacities
between human, technological, and political actors,
because “data operates within and alongside a range
of other powerful material and discursive signifiers”
that also work to shape practices, events, and out-
comes (Thornham and G
omez Cruz 2016, 5). The
conceptualization of data power and agency devel-
oped here—as relational, partial, and provisional,
and enacted through the coconstitution of people,
technologies, and political discourses—is in itself
provisional, although it might resonate with other
examples of data activism and other types of data
assemblages more broadly. A deterministic under-
standing of data as inherently powerful and capable
of enacting political goals is a problematic assump-
tion for data activism; however, the ability for activ-
ists to gain power through a careful redistribution of
agencies reveals both a “whatever works” pragmatism
underlying many activisms as well as the analytical
limitations of a focus on data activism as a distinct
and exclusive category. In this sense, paying atten-
tion to activism’s chameleonic quality can advance
our understanding of how data power is discursively
and materially interwoven with other forms of
power, providing an ideal laboratory for further
research by geographers and others interested in
urban technopolitical assemblages.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the peer reviewers and Editor Nik
Heynen, research participants in Johannesburg and
Cape Town, and Alex Wafer and students at
Wits University.
Funding
A portion of the research for this article was con-
ducted during a visiting fellowship at Wits
University, Johannesburg, which was funded by the
South African National Research Foundation.
ORCID
Jonathan Cinnamon http://orcid.org/0000-0001-
7383-6886
Notes
1. Although described as one of the world’s most
progressive RTI laws, PAIA requests are often
ignored, delayed, or denied.
2. See also recent work on communicative figurations
(e.g., Hepp, Breiter, and Hasebrink 2017; Couldry
and Hepp 2018).
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JONATHAN CINNAMON is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies
at Ryerson University, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada.
E-mail: jcinnamon@ryerson.ca. His research develops
methods for spatial data production and visualization for
low-resource settings and attends to the ethical and polit-
ical implications of data and technologies in processes of
social change.