Creating Data Publics for Governance explores projects from Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) where citizens interact with data through creative and cultural methods to explore understandings and relationships with place.

Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)

Under the Knowledge Mobilization Scheme, “Synthesising research on envisioning governance systems that work”.

As decision-making structures for local, regional and national governments increasingly prioritise data and evidence as resources for governance, a critical challenge facing democracies becomes the creation of public spaces in which these data can be considered and debated to enable equitable and effective governance systems.

We frame this challenge as a question of creating data publics – publics that are not only constituted by self-interest or shared identities but forged through citizens’ creative participatory engagement with data.

To address this challenge, our project examines how creative methods are being used in practice to bring such data publics into being.

We analyse examples in which artists, community organisers, and citizens engage data through creative, place-based processes, tracing when and how these methods are employed and how they shape collective forms of participation and decision-making. In doing so, we aim to better understand how creativity functions not only as a mode of expression but as a mechanism for democratic engagement with data.

This project is a collaboration between researchers at Simon Fraser University (Canada) and University of Southampton (UK).

Explore the cases

Following a scoping review, 15 projects from Canada and 15 projects from the UK were identified for closer exploration.

These projects were selected at the meeting point of creative methods and citizen participation in place-based decision-making. This analysis was structured using Sabina Leonelli’s cycle of knowledge production (from the article ‘what distinguishes data from models?’).

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