Imagining Data as an Extension of our Bodies
Leah M. Friedman (she/they)
For the last decade, I have been working as a professional dance artist. I have danced and toured with several contemporary dance companies in Philadelphia, PA and Phoenix, AZ, have taught countless modern dance classes, facilitated movement improvisation sessions, and created my own digital and live dance performances. For the last 3.5 years, I’ve continued dancing, touring, creating, and teaching at a professional level while getting my PhD in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University. In my research, I’ve been working to understand how we can all have more agency over our personal health data and information, especially in communities organizing around health justice. However, I’m starting this blog writing about dance to paint a picture of the internal conflict I’ve been facing during my PhD.
When I dance and facilitate class, I start by feeling out what I, and the people in my class, need that day. Dance is about sourcing from the body and feeling your guts move you. It is about listening to your environment and responding to it. It is about connecting with the people in the room, making decisions for your body, and theirs, that prioritize safety, joy, curiosity. It’s about unlocking tiny epiphanies that you feel in your body long before you can verbally articulate them. Dance, to me, has rarely felt like a good entry point into data because nothing could be less embodied or more disconnected than the way we talk about technology. Yet throughout my PhD, my mentors have pushed me to think about the inherent knowledge I have about embodiment and how my life as a professional dancer informs my research.
What I’m coming to realize is that paying attention to our bodies and their relationships with the world creates alternative starting points to thinking about data. If we keep starting with how data systems and digital technology are currently configured, it closes off other ways of thinking about the digital. Instead, what if we started by thinking about the ways we want to treat our bodies? What if we treated data as a part of our bodies? What if we treated data as an extension of our interpersonal relationships (much like navigating each other’s bodies when we’re dancing in the studio, the club, a block party, or anywhere social)?
I have started thinking about how to facilitate conversations that ask people to reimagine data as part of the body. In the last year, I’ve started various conference presentations by reading a short story I wrote that asks people to imagine themselves as a bit of health data. I originally wrote the story as part of a Zine that I made to facilitate conversations about community data trusts. The response I’ve gotten has been better than any academic explanation I could give. When I’ve read this story aloud, the concept of reimagining data management suddenly stops being abstract and becomes concrete. Because of how the short story has been received, I’m playing with how I can use the Zine as part of facilitating research workshops with community organizers to reimagine more just ways of approaching data management.
The workshops will be the second part of my dissertation research, following interviews I’m conducting with community organizers who are working to create alternative healthcare systems rooted in bodily autonomy and mutual aid (e.x. self-managed reproductive care, community clinics, etc.). My aim is to understand the value systems that motivate people to engage in alternative forms of healthcare and how organizers engage with digital data systems. Through this, I hope to identify starting points for redesigning our digital worlds by thinking about bodily autonomy and the interpersonal relationships that enable that autonomy. My dissertation is a research project as well as an exercise in imagining alongside community organizers enacting the world they want to live in. To quote Walidah Imarisha from in the introduction to the sci-fi anthology Octavia’s Brood:
All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds.
Walidah Imarisha
As part of the process of envisioning another world, I’m including a digital version of my Zine in this blog post and invite you to reach out if you ever want to talk reimagining!
Funding has been provided by California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
