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Book Cover for: Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, Anita Say Chan

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future

Anita Say Chan

The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's often violent and extractive "big data" regimes.

Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.


While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Book Details

  • Publisher: University of California Press
  • Publish Date: Jan 7th, 2025
  • Pages: 262
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.82in - 5.98in - 1.26in - 0.93lb
  • EAN: 9780520402843
  • Categories: Technology StudiesMedia StudiesActivism & Social Justice

About the Author

Anita Say Chan is a feminist and decolonial scholar of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.