Statactivism
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The French movement of statactivism advocates for the mobilization of statistics in support to social movements and agendas.[1]
Content
The program of French statactivistts is to ‘fight against’ as well as ‘fight with’ numbers, using a variety of possible strategies:[2][3]
- ‘Statistical judo’. This is a strategy of self-defence, whereby existing measures are ‘gamed’ as prescribed by the Goodhart's law;
- Denouncing the inadequacy or bias or unfairness of existing indicators and measures, e.g. from official statistics of poverty or inequality;[4]
- Developing alternative indicators to substitute for those above;[4]
- Identifying social contexts and problems which are invisible to existing statistics
Statactivism's intellectually belongs to the tradition of sociology of numbers.[2][5][6][7] Following Alain Desrosières[7] and Theodore Porter,[8] statactivists use statistics as a “tool of weakness”, which offer to the weak members of society the opportunity to act against their oppression by making injustice visible.[7]
See also
- Sociology of quantification
- Ethics of quantification
- Society for the Social Studies of Quantification - SSSQ [9]
- Data activism