Alison Powell on Data Walking

Alison Powell is a communications scholar, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In her early work, she focused on the interactions or exchanges between humans and technologies: on how the building of technologies is affected by people’s values, but also, how technological systems in turn change how people work, or cohabit. More recently, she has shown particular interest in how contemporary communities and citizenships take shape, specifically in the context of ‘smart cities’ – but also, which concerns citizenships raise at a time of datafication.
In this interview, we discuss the so-called ‘data walk’ (or ‘data walkshop’), a participatory methodology for discussion on data and its ethics, situated in urban space, that Powell developed. On a dedicated website, she characterises data walking as ‘a strategy for research creation and public engagement’ that involves people going out onto the street, looking at digital data and information from a specific perspective or concern. It is designed to elicit ‘discussions about data based in a shared experience of observing and moving through space’ in an attempt to ‘break down hierarchies of knowledge’.1 Below, we discuss its key features, but also delve into the history of such practices of reflective walking.