5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

For Indigenous peoples, historical encounters with statistics have been fraught, and none more so than when involving official data produced as part of colonial attempts at statecraft. In recent decades governments in settler colonial states of Australasia and North America have amassed large amounts of data on their Indigenous populations to generate statistics as ‘evidence’ for population monitoring and policy interventions. These data practices maintain continuities with colonial regimes of surveillance and domination, linked to hierarchies of knowledge and ongoing epistemic violence.

Set against this, Indigenous data activists are responding with their own agendas for social justice and nation-building through the frame of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov). At the heart of IDSov is the right of Indigenous peoples and nations to control the collection, ownership, and application of data about their people, territories, lifeways and natural resources. IDSov is grounded in pre-colonial understandings of sovereignty that offer a reimagining of data relations, and is supported by global human rights instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This session calls for papers that reveal how IDSov, as a field of research and site of activism, is catalysing social change within Indigenous communities, nation states and globally.