Data for Health Justice
Data is a powerful tool for justice and language for accountability. The United Nations describes data as the “lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability.” However, data can easily be manipulated and used to entrench inequities. This area of work explores how data intentionally used for health justice considers the human-societal factors.
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Data is one of the key languages of structural decision-making. Organisations seek data to fill knowledge gaps they have when making decisions, but often these data practices do not account for the more human and complicated factors, such as community lived experience and health impacts, that may be at odds with commercial and political agendas that factor ownership, capital, and the benefit of a few over the health of communities.
To support how communities can evidence the impacts of structural injustices and inform how community-favoured health justice solutions are developed, we need to develop ways for communities to “speak this language” in their advocacy while still maintaining their priorities and values.
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We hope to:
Demystify the rigour involved in the basics of data collection and support the criticism of existing data used to address injustice.
Empower communities to use data as a language for their justice advocacy through creating understanding and accountability.
Support advocates and ethical institutions in ethically defining injustices and justice pathways on a macro scale, which includes the decision on if data is the ethical or right language to frame a decision.
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Data for Health Justice is its own investigation into the principles, ethics, and practice of data as a language for health and environmental justice. Those who want to inform their strategy as community advocates and justice-led organisations can check out the various reports within this workstream. For a deeper development of practice, we have the Environmental Data for Health Justice Miro board which offers an array of content. If you are involved in one of our programmes or a collaborative project, there is a chance some of this material and more bespoke material may be presented. Lastly, we provide occasional opportunities for those advocating for their communities to co-create principles and applications of data in their advocacy.
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Despite what we have all been able to achieve with our current sources of data, there is still a lot of space for improvement on data that is intentionally used for health justice. Data intentionally used for health justice considers the human, societal factors when creating ranges and values. We should also consider the lived experience, which means that data alone cannot tell us the full picture of a person’s health or ability to heal. To fully capture lived experience, we need to create an equitable data ecosystem where a community can gather their own data and have it be as important as the data gathered by practitioners
ACTIVE PROGRAMMES
AIR IS KIN
A co-produced epidemiological project moving towards the abolition of “Right to Pollute” policies and to facilitate healing pathways and infrastructure for communities impacted by air pollution.
RIGHT TO KNOW
Right to Know is a web based data tool designed to allow you to discover more information about what's going on around you in the built environment and its relationship to health.
Our Research
A selection of works from this area of work.
If you want to read more, go to the Research Library.
Partner With Us
We work ecosystemically. We recognise that the pathway to the abolition of systems that create health injustices cannot be done alone. We always welcome approaches for partnerships with like-minded organisations to help drive our collective missions forward.
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