The Data Justice Working Group aims to provide support to center faculty, trainees and community partners with data access, measurement, and analytics to promote research and knowledge justice and equitable data accessibility, transparency, utility, and impact. The core will also support the coordination of data-related activities across local projects and cores and the national Data Innovation Hub.
Additionally, the Data Justice Working Group is an interdisciplinary team of data, measurement, and analytic experts (quantitative, qualitative, and biological) available for consultation and collaboration across study projects and cores.
The Data Justice Working Group will focus on community-centered outcomes and measures that advance the Center’s overall mission of interdisciplinary, community-based, multi-level interventions, research and training to center the maternal health and well-being of Black populations and populations experiencing systemic oppression (e.g., racism, sexism).
The Data Justice Working Group uses an organizing framework of research justice. “Research justice” was first coined in 2006 by DataCenter: Research for Justice with the aim of placing strategic information in the hands of communities leading social change.
Community-led and community-engaged research initiatives can both heal the harm done by traditional outsider-driven research and give communities the tools to conduct their own research that answers urgent questions and leads to meaningful change.
Tenets include:
- Access to information (not just misinformation and outside expert research but what they truly seek and deserve) that impacts their lives
- Ability to define what is valid ‘knowledge,’ as well as methods to produce this
- Capacity to produce their own knowledge
- Capacity to use all forms of knowledge
- Control over all stages of the ‘knowledge lifecycle’—from producing, analyzing, interpreting, packaging and deploying knowledge—on an equal footing with all other institutions in society