School of Communication Invites Students to Reimagine Data and Become Data Fluent

Traditional research methods cannot keep up with the problems society currently faces. Data is too often thought of as neutral, but it can be manipulated to shape social realities. For these reasons, being data fluent is key to understanding how to use data as a dynamic force for creativity, collaboration and ensuring data justice.

Understanding this need, the School of Communication is delivering a new course to teach data fluency to students throughout Simon Fraser University and other institutions: CMNS 858 - Reimagining Data.

“Training in data fluency equips future researchers to address social, political, and cultural challenges across disciplines. Data fluencies research combines methods from the arts and humanities with critical work in the data sciences to express, imagine, and create innovative engagements with and resistances to our data-filled world.”

The course emphasizes interdisciplinary work to ensure students also develop the skills to collaborate with other researchers and communities impacted by their work.

For this Lesage is collaborating with School of Interactive Arts and Technology professor Gillian Russell to deliver the course. Lesage and Russell recently co-founded the Imaginative Methods Lab at Simon Fraser University; an environment dedicated to the design, analysis and deployment of research methods for co-creative research.

“What excites me most about this course is that we’re running it as an interdisciplinary studio, where students will develop their own research projects while working in a collaborative environment,” says Russell.

“This approach allows students from diverse backgrounds to exchange ideas, experiment with new methods, and push their work in unexpected and innovative directions.”

These students will learn from the School of Communication’s unique approach to data literacy and knowledge production.

“Where data is treated as more objective truth in other disciplines, here we offer a different perspective that is, I think, really necessary: that data itself is already interpreted, and any manipulation of data creates specific stories about information rather than presenting objective truth,” says School of Communication Director Milena Droumeva. 

“I think in this era of misinformation it is important for all students at SFU to understand that data fluency also means critical data literacy, critical knowledge literacy—understanding that knowledge is produced socially and not only factually.”

Reimagining Data will launch as an intersessional course beginning in May 2025. The course is open to all graduate students, and potentially select undergraduate students.

Click here to learn more about how to apply to Reimagining Data