Conference Agenda

This Dream Team session proposes to rethink and reimagine the life of data through qualitative and postqualitative lenses by considering data’s capacity to act, transgress, trouble, and produce. In Western research, data is often objectified as a passive, inert, and disorganized resource to which order and value are added thanks to humans’ analytic acumen (MacLure, 2013; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018). As researchers, we are taught to manage data as technicians (St. Pierre, 2024), to filter, code, and categorize it in order to make it worthy by academic standards. Data is therefore largely treated as a commodity which is insufficient in itself—some ‘thing’ that’s always in need of (higher) human intervention and transformation. In this Dream Team session, we therefore ask: what might happen if we consider data not as passive but as active, as able to shape and transform us as much (if not more) as we attempt to shape it?

Building from scholarship rooted in decolonial thought, posthumanist theory, and Indigenous epistemologies, this session invites participants to explore how data exceeds positivist categories, partakes in affective flows, and productively troubles the unfolding of research encounters. Rather than stabilizing data as fixed representation, we wonder how we can engage with data as alive, relational, and unruly. Isn’t data is, after all, a label we feel we must put - for fear of not being deemed rigorous enough - on the encounters that make our research projects?

We therefore offer to explore, during this session, collaborative and creative ways of being and becoming with data (rather than seeking to master, order or contain it), prompted by the following theoretical elements:

Drawing on Barad’s notion of intra-action (2007), we acknowledge that we are, in fact, constantly intra-acting as we merge past and present selves through working with the data. Going further, relying on our own lived experience, as posthuman autoethnographers, has the power to overturn the exploitative paradigm and means we have to forge relationships with our own voices as data;

Working with MacLure’s concept of glowing data (2013, 2023), we attune to how data-as-lived-experience can provoke, unsettle, and transform the very conditions and methods of research;

Some core principles of pluriversal praxis (Escobar, 2018; Ortega, 2025) require that we think with data in ways that refuse the fiction of one universal world or epistemology. We accept that they lead us to see and accept that data lives within relations—stories, lands, and memories that exceed capture or translation;

Some Indigenous perspectives view and honor data as gift, as Kovach (2021) suggests, rather than seeing it as a disposable kind of commodity. This view has the capacity to alter our practices, ethical commitments, onto-epistemological orientations, and methodological choices.

The aim of this Dream Team is not to develop yet another set of procedures for dealing with data but rather, to listen and reach for frictions and reciprocities as we recognize data as a co-participant in world-making, and collectively engage with ways of becoming with data differently in our research projects. We are particularly interested in what emerges when researchers acknowledge being “taken elsewhere” by data—into uncharted affective, material, and relational terrains.

Participants will therefore be invited into a collaborative exercise to map how they currently perceive their relationship with data and where some of the theoretical elements shared above might take them. Using storytelling and visual mapping tools, we will sketch where resistance, friction, boundaries, contradictions, and flows are encountered, thereby attending to the multiple ways in which vibrant data moves us, resists categorization and ownership, and troubling the assumption that one universal truth resides in data waiting to be unlocked.