Coordinating Migration: Caring for Communities & Their Data

This study inquires into the perspectives of the many groups who collect, manage, and use data generated as people migrate and settle in Canada. While their notions of care for communities and data may sometimes conflict, a range of stakeholders collaborate in their activities with data on immigration, including settlement service providers, migrant justice activists, immigration researchers, government staff and policymakers, and designers of digital systems that gather newcomers' data. As a connected yet distanced collective of stakeholders whose practices with data influence one another and the newcomers they study or serve, these same stakeholders also enact changes in their ways of using data and digital technologies in the context of experimentation with big data analytics, automation, and greater demands for data-based reporting and sharing. To this end, this research joins practical and theoretical discussions by working to strengthen webs of relations with greater capacity for care, informed reflection, and responsibility in the use of communities' data. Based on the lens of care, this project advances a critical approach to drastic shifts in information practices across areas of contemporary life, of which migration is a particularly pressing issue.