The French movement of statactivism advocates for the mobilization of statistics in support to social movements and agendas.
Content
The program of French statactivistts is to ‘fight against’ as well as ‘fight with’ numbers, using a variety of possible strategies:
[I. Bruno, E. Didier, and J. Prévieux, Statactivisme. Comment lutter avec des nombres. Paris: Zones, La Découverte, 2014.]
* ‘Statistical judo’. This is a strategy of self-defence, whereby existing measures are ‘gamed’ as prescribed by the
Goodhart's law
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on mon ...
;
* Denouncing the inadequacy or bias or unfairness of existing indicators and measures, e.g. from official statistics of poverty or inequality;
[P. Concialdi, “Le BIP40: alerte sur la pauvreté,” in Statactivisme. Comment lutter avec des nombres, I. Bruno, E. Didier, and J. Prévieux, Eds. Zones, La Découverte, 2014, pp. 199–211.]
*Developing alternative indicators to substitute for those above;
*Identifying social contexts and problems which are invisible to existing statistics
Statactivism's intellectually belongs to the tradition of sociology of numbers.
[A. Desrosières, “Statistics and social critique,” Open J. Sociopolitical Stud., vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 348–359, 2014.
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Following
Alain Desrosières
Alain Desrosières (18 April 1940 – 15 February 2013) was a statistician, sociologist and historian of science in France, well known for his work in the history of statistics He is the author of '' The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of St ...
and
Theodore Porter
Theodore M. Porter (born 1953) is a professor who specializes in the history of science in the Department of History at UCLA. He has authored several books, including ''The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900''; and ''Trust in Numbers: The ...
, 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.
See also
*
Sociology of quantification Sociology of quantification can be defined as the investigation of quantification as a sociological phenomenon in its own right.W. N. Espeland and M. L. Stevens“A sociology of quantification,” Eur. J. Sociol., vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 401–436, 200 ...
*
Ethics of quantification Ethics of quantification is the study of the ethical issues associated to different forms of visible or invisible forms of quantification. These could include algorithms, metrics/indicators, statistical and mathematical modelling, as noted in a revi ...
* Society for the Social Studies of Quantification - SSSQ
Society for the Social Studies of Quantification - SSSQ
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* Data activism Data activism is a social practice that uses technology and data. It emerged from existing activism sub-cultures such as hacker an open-source movements. Data activism is a specific type of activism which is enabled and constrained by the data infr ...
References
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Statistical organizations
Quantification (science)
Mathematical and quantitative methods (economics)