Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics and Re-Storying

From Biocultural Landscapes at Risk to Archiving the Dead
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-394-15333-6
Verlag: John Wiley & Sons Inc

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten

This interdisciplinary book navigates applying decolonial theories to practices across disciplines

Decolonial work requires remaining deferent to communities and collaborators while also leveraging resources to support their priorities. Decolonial Approaches to Data Ethics and Re-Storying: From Biocultural Landscapes at Risk to Archiving the Dead provides a roadmap tracing the ways in which digital technologies, global biodiversity, cultural heritage, and decolonial futures are deeply interconnected.

In conversation with Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, and Nordic postcolonial and decolonial studies, this handbook surveys decolonial approaches to digital and academic practices. The authors argue that digital spaces and media can act as spaces of decolonial intervention within community-based work, historical re-telling, biocultural research projects, educational and historical archives, and museum display.

Data comes in so many forms that there is no one definition used by all scientific societies or national funding bodies. What has become evident is that data can be wrought with social meaning, often reflecting the values of the people who collected it, through how and why it was collected, what information was collected and what was ignored or left out of a study or collection.

Taking a decolonial stance to data is to accept that data might hold multiple truths, and that data should expand past the Western concept of sterile objectivity to take many different forms that respect different ways of knowing. At the core of this handbook’s argument, digital spaces and platforms are often overlooked as simple mechanisms to display information and organize data. Much to the contrary, digital technologies do not create neutral spaces where information is arranged without implicit meanings built into their structure, social and cultural use, and experience. Digital spaces, like Western academic ways of thinking and doing research, require decolonial approaches to organize and make data available in ways that avoid replicating colonial values, and to tell stories of epistemic resistance, resurgence, and survivance.

Developing new decolonial digital content or databases, whether for climate crisis storytelling, updating outdated colonial histories, environmental conservation efforts, or decolonizing museum displays requires being held accountable to postcolonial and decolonial educators, scholars, thinkers, and advocates.

This practical book addresses:

- Relational work with communities
- The ethics of social science methods
- Re-storying colonial narratives through media interpretation at heritage sites and parks
- Decolonial issues within environmental conservations efforts
- The deep entanglement of cultural items and ancestors with environments and landscape
- Issues of epistemic justice in data categorization, archiving, and mapping

Designed for undergraduate, master's, and interdisciplinary PhD students in digital conservation, ethnobiology, museum studies, decolonial studies, Native and Indigenous studies, STS, ecology, environmental communication, archival studies, environmental media studies, environmental justice, digital futures, environmental studies, human ecology, archaeology, anthropology, public history, postcolonial studies, community-based research, social science ethics, environmental conservation, and critical technology studies.

‘What role do digital technologies have to play in decolonial practice, institutional change, and reparative justice? Meryl Shriver-Rice and Sarah Hiepler-Basty’s superb new book brings a cross-disciplinary range of new thinking to this urgent question, from universities to museums and heritage sites. An essential text for students and practitioners alike, this landmark volume reframes approaches to whose stories are told, by whom, and on what terms.’

– Professor Dan Hicks, FSA, MClfA, Curator of World Archaeollogy at the Pitt Rivers Museu

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shriver-Rice, Meryl

Hiepler-Basty, Sarah

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Museumskunde, Materielle Kultur, Erinnerungskultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Angewandte Ethik & Soziale Verantwortung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xiv
The Need for Decolonial Digital Interventions xv
Data Ethics xv
Aimed at a Western Readership xvi
How Can We Be More Decolonial in Our Thinking and Doing? xvii
Decolonization and the Rise of Decolonial Practice xvii
"Standing with" Instead of "Giving Back" xviii
Technologies Are Not Neutral xviii
Relational Allyship and Decolonial Practice xix
In a Nutshell xx
Being an Ally Means Being Reflexive and Deferent xx
Beyond Superficial Positionality xxii
Western Claims to Indigeneity xxii
The Power of Decolonial Re-storying xxiii
Decolonial Re-storying Has an Emphasis on Language xxiv
The Possibility of Ethnographic Method to Examine Western Knowledge xxiv
Chapter Overview xxv
References xxvii
Further Reading xxviii

1 DIGITAL JUSTICE AND THE ENDURING LEGACY OF WHITE SETTLER COLONIALISM 1

2 ARE HUMANS SEPARATE FROM NATURE? HOW DIGITAL JUSTICE IS RELATED TO ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION 33

3 DECOLONIAL RE-STORYING AND STORYWORK 55

4 DIGITAL INTERVENTIONS ARE ALSO ANALOGUE. PARTNERING AND COLLABORATING WITH COMMUNITIES 77

5 DECOLONIAL AND DIGITAL CONSERVATION 105

6 WHO OWNS THE DATA AND WHOSE STORY IS LEFT OUT? THINKING THROUGH DATA SHARING AND SOVEREIGNTY 151

7 HOW DOES THE DIGITAL FORMAT MATTER? WHAT IS THE POINT OF VIRTUAL REPATRIATION? 179

8 DECOLONIAL EXAMINATIONS OF BRITISH MUSEUMS: DISPLAY, STUDY, AND DEHUMANIZATION OF THE DEAD 197

9 ARCHIVING THE DEAD: REPATRIATING ANCESTORS IN BRITISH MUSEUMS AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS 219

10 CURATOR'S PERSPECTIVES: COLONIAL DISCOURSES ON CARING FOR, ARCHIVING, AND EXHIBITING THE NORTH AFRICAN DEAD IN BRITISH MUSEUMS 250

11 ETHICS IS UNAVOIDABLY NESTED IN CONCEPTUALIZING THE FUTURE 271

References 273
Index 274

Über Autor(innen)

Meryl Shriver-Rice, Ph.D. is an environmental social scientist and archaeologist and Director of the Coastal Heritage at Risk Taskforce (CHART). She is Head of Research for the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and an Affiliated Researcher with Florida State University’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Sarah Hiepler-Basty, Ph.D. completed her doctoral work at the University of Aberdeen, where her research focused on the discursive framing of human remains in museums. She has guest lectured and taught social science courses at University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen and Southern Methodist University. She has extensive museum and archaeological fieldwork and experience in Italy, the UK and the United States.