‘They do ask, but it is not the way you ask’: data collection as communication for internally displaced persons in South Sudan

The datafication of the third sector has promises and challenges which are brought into sharp focus in the humanitarian field. Principles of partnership with those in need of humanitarian assistance stand in tension with the realities of data technologies controlled by humanitarian agencies and practitioners. Questions of data ethics, data justice and data rights are all brought to the fore when data is gathered from internally displaced people who often have limited data literacy and are living in contexts of vulnerability. At the core of these discussions are debates about the claims to empowerment of affected communities, promised by the datafication of humanitarianism, and debates about legibility, whereby data processes are seen to prioritise making affected communities legible to humanitarians rather than disrupting humanitarian logics. In this paper we ask how empowerment and legibility in humanitarian data collection shape data as communication. We draw on qualitative fieldwork in internally displaced persons camps in South Sudan, reflecting on the communicative gaps between internally displaced persons and humanitarians. We highlight how the very processes designed to assist internally displaced persons can continue to disempower, and the importance of addressing data disempowerment in the humanitarian field.