Routinized data activism: Citizen data practices and everyday data citizenship in South Korea

Based on ethnographic research with a grassroots civic hacking community in South Korea, this article examines how civic hackers enact data citizenship under the temporal and labor pressures of datafied societies. Drawing on a practice-oriented framework, it analyzes how civic hackers integrate data work with everyday practices to secure autonomy and navigate limited time and resources. The study develops the concept of routinized data activism to describe data-mediated civic engagement shaped through habitual participation, peer learning, and coordination. Routinization operates as a strategy under constraint, enabling civic hackers to cultivate data citizenship not through technical competence or data access alone, but through the interplay of everyday practices, collective identities, and sociopolitical conditions.