Our Data Bodies

Our Data Bodies (ODB) is a US multi-city participatory action research and community organizing project founded in 2015 to examine how data collection and algorithmic surveillance systems affect the lives of marginalized communities — specifically communities of color, low-income households, and communities touched by the criminal legal system. ODB conducted approximately 135 in-depth community interviews across three sites — Charlotte (North Carolina), Detroit (Michigan), and Los Angeles (California) — each led by a local grassroots organization operating from within the affected communities.

Structure and partner organizations

ODB is organized through Allied Media Projects (Detroit). Three core partner organizations anchor the city sites:

• Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP) — a sponsored project of Allied Media Projects based in Detroit's majority-Black neighborhoods, led by Tawana Petty as Data Justice Program Director. DCTP had built community-driven approaches to technology and data governance in Detroit prior to ODB; the project extended that work into the data-justice research frame.
• Center for Community Transitions (Charlotte, NC) — an organization serving people returning from incarceration, led by Tamika Lewis. ODB's Charlotte site focused on how data surveillance systems specifically affect re-entry populations.
• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (Los Angeles, CA) — a sponsored project of Los Angeles Community Action Network, led by Mariella Saba. The Coalition had developed a community-based counter-surveillance practice in LA before ODB's formation; its "Power Not Paranoia" organizing framework is embedded in the Digital Defense Playbook.

Virginia Eubanks co-founded ODB and served as a research collaborator across all three sites; her concurrent work on Automating Inequality (2018) shares community and analytical foundations with ODB's inquiry. Dr. Seeta Peña Gangadharan (Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics) served as principal academic researcher and co-author on ODB's publications, providing the project's institutional research anchor in the UK.

Research approach

ODB's methodology is explicitly participatory: community members were not passive research subjects but co-researchers who shaped the questions and received outputs in formats they could use in their organizing. The project documented how residents navigate data collection across intersecting domains: public benefit and welfare systems, housing, policing, and criminal-legal re-entry. The research traced how algorithmic and database systems encode historical inequities into the daily encounters of low-income and over-policed communities — restricting people's ability to meet basic needs by encoding suspicion and precarity into automated eligibility determinations, background-check systems, and predictive-policing tools.

The primary funding source was the Digital Trust Foundation, a charitable fund established from the settlement of a class-action lawsuit over Facebook's "Beacon" program, with assets directed toward digital privacy and public-interest work. ODB received Digital Trust Foundation grants from approximately 2015 through 2019.

Digital Defense Playbook

The project's flagship public output is the Digital Defense Playbook: Community Power Tools for Reclaiming Data (2019), authored by Gangadharan, Petty, Lewis, and Saba and published through Allied Media Projects. The Playbook is a popular-education workbook — approximately 200 pages of facilitation guides, community stories, and tip sheets on specific data-threat scenarios — designed for use by community organizers, not as a privacy-tips document for individuals. Its organizing premise: data threats facing marginalized communities are political problems requiring collective response, not hygiene lapses requiring individual behavior change. The "Power Not Paranoia" section, drawn from Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's counter-surveillance practice, is the Playbook's theoretical and tactical spine. Spanish-language and stand-alone tip-sheet versions were distributed through allied organizing networks.

Significance

ODB arrived at a moment — mid-2010s — when dominant framings for algorithmic harm were either regulatory (GDPR, US consumer-privacy bills) or academic (fairness audits, bias benchmarks). ODB produced a different research tradition: closer to the popular-education and organizing lineages of welfare-rights, disability-rights, and tenant movements, and explicitly shaped by communities most affected by the systems under study. Its three-city comparative design and focus on the interlocking of data systems with criminal-legal exposure, housing, and poverty shaped subsequent data-justice research and organizing in the US and contributed to the broader framing in which Automating Inequality and Race After Technology found their audience.