Tracing Data Politics: Two ethnographic case studies on digital data for a Verkehrswende in the City of Frankfurt/Main

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Martina Klausner
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516320897

The project investigates ethnographically how environmental data related to traffic issues are generated, pro¬cessed, and used for political negotiations by different stakeholders in the City of Frankfurt/Main. The project aims to study the manifold ways data are rendered relevant in politics and governance, by the municipality and its partners, but also by political groups, such as citizen initiatives and political networks. It asks how “troubled environments” are enacted through digital information infrastructures, by different actors in multiple ways, and made an object of intervention and regulation. Data Politics foregrounds how, on the one hand, data are used in political conflicts to generate evidence and visualize problematic issues, resulting in the datafication of politics; and, on the other hand, it highlights how the very production, processing, and representation of data through digital information infrastructures and platforms is already infused with various interests and intentions, hence the inherent “politics of data”. The project investigates emerging data politics based on two contrasting case studies and their intersections: (1) the production of data and digital information infrastructures by the municipality (the City of Frankfurt), their partners, and other state actors as part of a programme to tackle climate change and implement appropriate measures in relation to a proposed Verkehrswende; and (2) citizen initiatives, local political groups and their networks, who also increas¬ingly invoke data of different kinds to contest official governance and politics and propose spe¬cific data-based policy measures for an ecological Verkehrswende in Frankfurt. Besides the thematic focus, the project will employ an innova¬tive mix of methods, including digital methods, for tracing controversies as well as data generation and dissemination as part of ethnographic research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants