Data futurities: Negotiating statistical citizenship and ethnoracial visibility in Portugal's 2021 population census

This article examines the controversies surrounding the 2021 Portuguese census, centring on debates over proposed but ultimately excluded ethnoracial questions amidst a broader shift towards digital and register-based census-making. We argue that ‘data futurities’ – in and of censuses – are produced through reform narratives that promise modernisation while deferring politically fraught forms of visibility. Treating censuses as performative technologies that organise national imaginaries across time, we analyse how changing data practices reconfigure participation, visibility, and statistical citizenship. Drawing on archival materials, reborn digital media sources, and official documentation, we trace how Afro-descendant and Portuguese Roma communities mobilised competing claims over recognition, data ownership, and participation, and how these demands were channelled through technical justifications and institutional risk management. We show that the expansion of administrative data does not resolve demands for ethnoracial visibility; it displaces classificatory decisions to other instruments and infrastructures, reshaping the terms of belonging. These findings suggest that the stakes of ‘future’ censuses lie as much in inclusive nation-making via statistical citizenship as in technological innovation.