On the Productive Paradoxes of Scaling Data

PLEASE NOTE: Teams link will be emailed to attendees on the day of the event.

ABSTRACT: Data is often understood as a way of making the world legible—by rendering it measurable, comparable, and actionable. Yet as data moves across local, national, and global contexts, it encounters friction. This seminar examines the productive paradoxes that arise in the scaling of data: tensions between intimacy and abstraction, fragmentation and integration, specificity and universality. Drawing on qualitative research into the production and circulation of feminicide data in Mexico, I show how scaling becomes a site of epistemic and political struggle. Grounded in feminist sociologies of knowledge and STS, I approach scaling not as a neutral or linear operation but as a political and relational practice—one that shapes what data is, how it is made, and what it can do. Through three empirical sites—grassroots data activism, state classification systems, and international standard-setting—I trace the paradoxes of distance, discordance, and dimension. At the local scale, distance produces data intimacies as proximity foregrounds affective and situated forms of recounting. At the national scale, discordance generates data debris as fragmented and inconsistent classifications accumulate across bureaucratic systems. At the global scale, dimension gives rise to data bargaining, as efforts to standardise universal metrics collide with local specificities and political negotiations. The analysis offers broader insights into how data acquires meaning as it moves. Ultimately, I argue that data are not singular facts but ontologically multiple configurations: partial, situated, and always in-the-making.