Data-Becoming: History, Violence, and Justice

Abstract

In this paper, I offer a materialist perspective on data-becoming through a series of (non)living encasements. The living bodies included as examples here (Emmett Till, William T. Simpson, and LaVerne Turner) point to a historical legacy of violence and justice that continues, albeit differently, in different contexts, at different times, and from different social positions. These encasements show that any meanings imbued in data are dependent on when and where it arises, what is intra-acting with it, and in what context. Along these lines, I suggest data is always in-process of becoming something other at the level of material intra-action. This paper understands the movement of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies for justice and their coincidental, intra-active relations as a set of ongoing, changing conditions that re/de/construct (non)violent realities across time and space. I offer a way to reconsider data as always evolving and resistant to the confines of written research which may open up pathways for non-binary applications of historical fact, violent encounter, and political justice in critical qualitative research.