REU Site: The Data Justice Academy

This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). It has both scientific and societal benefits in addition to integrating research and education. The Data Justice Academy (DJA) is a ten-week summer program at the University of Virginia (UVA) that provides undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds with research experiences, technical training, and professional development.

The program seeks to encourage students to see Data Science and Computational Social Science as avenues for helping their communities and making a difference in the world. Research teams are led by faculty trained in culturally responsive mentoring and with deep knowledge of experiential pedagogies. The DJA program continuously improves its curriculum for student development in data skills, sociotechnical knowledge, and research acumen but also emphasizes social and cultural capital.

Mentoring is at the heart of the program, with rigorous training of faculty and graduate student mentors.

Overseen jointly by UVA’s Equity Center and School of Data Science, the DJA supports faculty-mentored projects in three broad areas: (1) employing the tools of data science to document, study and combat social inequalities, (2) advancing the development of ethical data science tools and data sets, and (3) studying data practices as socially constructed and contested spheres of human activity. With the proliferation of automated decision systems and artificial intelligence in everyday life, such research is vital to ensuring that the data and algorithmic practices that underly these tools are socially beneficial.

Data Justice takes as its first and fundamental question, “For whom does this model fail?” (O’Neil, 2016, 2017). By centering vulnerability to harm, data justice advocates for better technologies, with better outcomes and lower risks for all.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.