“When a data system uses ethnic data for purposes of surveillance or risk profiling, discriminatory outcomes are not an accident, but a feature of its design.”
Gerwin van Schie is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at Utrecht University. In 2022, he concluded the NWO-funded PhD-project “Datafication of Race and Ethnicity in the Netherlands: Investigating Practices, Politics and Appropriation of Governmental Open Data”. In this research, Van Schie focussed on how Dutch immigrant populations are ‘datafied’ by various societal institutions. Van Schie critically reflects on bias and injustice caused by the data sources, systems, and practices of applications based on CBS statistics by employing a critical data studies approach with a postcolonial perspective. The results of this investigation can be read in his dissertation (LINK)
Van Schie is currently conducting research into how green metaphors are used in digital culture. His first publication on this subject was published in December 2023 in the anthropological journal Etnofoor and describes how royal art reflects on Dutch nationality in binary code and uses metaphors such as roots and clay (LINK). He is writing his next article in this series with blockchain researcher Inte Gloerich about how green language actively contributes to the 'greenwashing' of digital forms of colonialism in general, and within blockchain-based forest conservation technology in particular.
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