WORKSHOP

Data Migration and Mobilities: Towards a New Research Agenda

Data has long been described as flows, streams, journeys, or transfers — metaphors that have
provided rich ways of thinking about how information circulates. Yet we still know too little about
the underlying social mechanisms by which data moves, replicates, and transforms across contexts.
To address this gap, recent studies have started to propose new conceptual and methodological
frameworks. One line of work introduces data migration to understand data movements through
analogies with human mobility and theories of social transformation (Masso et al., 2025). Another
develops the notion of data mobilities, focusing on the mechanisms of replication, proliferation,
and transformation in data sharing (Kitchin, et al., 2025).Taken together, these perspectives point to the emergence of a new research focus concerned with
how data moves, what frictions and paradoxes shape these movements, and how they transform
societies. They open crucial questions: How can data be imagined as non-rivalrous and frictionless
while in practice its circulation is hindered and limited? How does the processes of sharing reshape
datasets and the social realities they represent? When do flows of data empower individuals and
communities, and when do they entrench inequalities and dependencies? How does data
migrations/mobilities contribute to state and corporate regimes of governance and to the political
economy of data and facilitate data capitalism?This workshop seeks to bring these perspectives into dialogue and to collectively explore data
migration and data mobilities as an emerging and shared research agenda. We invite conceptual,
methodological, and empirical contributions that critically examine the paradoxes of how data
moves, to explore the transformations it produces in governance, social life, and geopolitics, and to
debate the frameworks and methods needed to understand these dynamics as both technical and
societal transformations.