Environmental data as a relational mediator of contentious publicness: Data curation and environmental data activism

This study focuses on the grassroots data practices of an environmental non-government organization (ENGO), examining the constitutive role of data in environmental activism in China. Drawing on the concept of contentious publicness, it analyses the processual and relational dynamics of the ENGO-led data activism to tackle environmental pollution at the interrelated material, spatial and temporal levels. Through participatory observations and in-depth interviews, it first examines the material agency of data infrastructure in enabling environmental participation. Then, it explores the spatiality and temporality of activists’ action repertoires. The findings demonstrate that the activist engagement with data follows a non-confrontational approach, evolving in the compromised middle ground between embeddedness and marginalization. Environmental data serves as a relational mediator in activists’ continuous process of making tactical responses to disrupt the status quo while not completely denying or subverting existing power relations. Moving beyond the contestational view of data, the study applies a non-binary and processual account of data activism, contributes to a deeper understanding of the relational configurations of power in data politics. It sheds light on the institutional, technological, and social imaginaries of environmentalism that shape the building of environmental data infrastructure and cultivate new forms of environmental action in the specific sociopolitical context of China. Moreover, the situated analysis of data activism contributes to diversifying the Western-centric understanding of the transformative potentials of data and calls for more scholarly attention to the relational dynamics of data politics in the Global South.