Unsettling data

Unsettling Data

Mapping Labour and Land against the Representationalist Legal Form

Cover with four differently obfuscated photographs, reading 'Unsettling Data / Mapping Labour and Land against the Representationalist Legal Form - Dilan Dagaz'

Details

ISBN: TBA

382 Pages

176 x 250 mm

Publication Date: 30 December 2025

License: Migrantifa Commons BY-NC

Donations: This book is released open-access under terms set by the Migrantifa Commons BY-NC license linked above. Please consider donating towards the publishing costs. Send donations by bank transfer to Dilan Dagaz, Reference: Unsettling Data.

Download: coming soon

Description

What prevents data governance law from redressing the widespread exploitation of labour and land rampant across the data economies of our digital Earth? Unsettling Data answers this question by scrutinising the legal grammar of ‘data’ to expose the persistence of hierarchical power relations between the observer and the observed. The role of the modern legal form in fortifying and obscuring these power relations is elucidated. Proposing representationalism as the framework to map these hidden yet pervasive power relations, the book reveals how the representationalist legal form serves to delink the agency of the data subject from unjust labour and land exploitation in the digital political economy. Highlighting the importance of Indigenous/Adivasi perspectives for unsettling the philosophical core of Western(ised) data governance, Unsettling Data argues for the formal reconceptualisation of data as the entangled human and unhuman agencies implicated in its production; paving the way for a new legal grammar of data rooted in relational reciprocity.

Unsettling Data will be of interest to readers in critical legal theory, law and humanities, law and political economy, data protection, information law, AI governance, intellectual property as well as anyone seeking to understand the legal form or aesthetics of data from a critical lens.

Author

Dilan Dagaz is an independent researcher and writer based in the UK. He has previously served as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Law at the University of Exeter and holds a PhD in Legal Sciences summa cum laude from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Having worked under different names with the civil society and academia across India, Germany, and UK, he holds significant international experience of policy advocacy, research communication, teaching and organising on issues of digital rights, net neutrality, media law, algorithmic regulation, data governance, and intellectual property. Stepping away from academia and the mainstream legal world, Dilan currently practises as a witch, with research interests at the intersection of magic, law, science, and the nature of reality.

Table of Contents

Note from the Author

Acknowledgments

Poem: I am not your data

Part I: Framing Representationalism

1. Introduction

2. Representationalism and Data’s Legal Form

Part II: Exposing Representationalist Configurations

3. Data Within the Non-Law

4. Data Within the Law

5. Data between the Legal Person and Thing

Part III: Unsettling Representationalist Imaginaries

6. Data and the Erasure of Human Agency

7. Data and the Erasure of Unhuman Agency

Epilogue

Beyond Representationalism: Divinatory Play Projects

Beyond Representationalism: Tactics of Earthy Data