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Despite the growing “data imperative” and “fetishization of data” across organizational contexts, critical scholars have adhered to a set of normative understandings for how people experience and engage with data and datafication in and around organizations: namely, as numbers and statistics that are “captured”, interpreted, and operationalized. In reality, however, data and datafication are experienced within organizational life in a multiplicity of ways that often have very little to do with numbers and statistics. In this essay, we shift our attention to these less overt and less examined ways in which data and datafication shape organizational life—specifically, the aesthetic, emotional, and discursive aspects of our everyday encounters with it. By attending to the multiple, complex, and nuanced entanglements of data and organization, organizational scholars will be better equipped to navigate the increasingly fraught terrain between technocratic data worship and anti-science politics that characterize the current political moment. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more politicized, historicized, and democratized data studies that can support movements for social, economic, and ecological justice.

This article draws on a case study of the Michaëlle Jean Foundation—a Canadian arts-based charitable organization—to examine processes of national imagining in a charitable sector shaped by neo-liberal capitalism. Utilizing interviews, field notes, and organizational documents, I show how discourses of the nation intersect with the arts to reframe political struggles along culturalist lines, such that social justice optics mask an apolitical and technical model for addressing structural injustice. While foundation-funded artists can engage in creative pushback, I argue that the neo-liberalization of the sector severely limits this national (re)imagining, either shutting it down completely or reconfiguring it in line with a depoliticized framework for social change, further reaffirming dominant mythologies of Canada. With this case-focused analysis, I hope to illuminate how the censorship of resistance in the charitable sector is not always an explicit process driven by the threat of funding withdrawal. Rather, a much more insidious form of depoliticization can occur within charitable sector contexts that have institutionalized and continue to circulate dominant discourses of the nation in their imaginings of better futures—in this instance, through intersections with the arts.