Data Workers' Inquiry

DATA WORKERS’ INQUIRY is a global, radically participatory research initiative spanning nine countries across five continents. Here, data workers themselves become community researchers, identifying urgent issues, formulating their own questions, and choosing the formats that best tell their stories: zines, documentaries, comics, essays, podcasts, and animations can be downloaded from the project repository.

For Data Workers‘ Inquiry, we created and developed Workers’ Inquiry as a Research Methodology or WIRM, a framework designed to turn hidden and precarious labor into a shared, politicized site for knowledge-making, public engagement, and tangible change.

data workers worldwide report on their workplaces

The Inquiries

16 data workers in Venezuela, Kenya, Syria, Brazil and Germany conducting research with their colleagues in their respective workplaces and reporting on labor conditions and widespread practices in the AI industry. Explore the inquiries below!

Data Workers in Kenya Organize!

Learn more about the grievances of data workers at Sama, Cloud Factory, and Remotasks, and how they organize to demand better working conditions.

Data Work beyond data work

Invited Pieces

Artists, translators, writers, nurses, and internet users produce data for AI without compensation. As part of the Data Workers‘ Inquiry, workers collectives describe how they organize to fight power concentration and exploitation in the tech industry.

data workers' inquiry

The Team

We are the organizing team developing a methodology and a platform for data workers to conduct individual inquiries. We provide guidance and training in specific data collection and analysis methods, and constantly monitor the legal and ethical boundaries of the inquiries.

The Data workers' Inquiry

Supported by amazing people:

Videography: Petros Teka

Website: Lena Pohlmann, David Hartmann, Marc Pohl

Events production and support: Max Rech, Christie Taylor

Copy editing: Nicholas Rodelo

Graphic design: Heitor Bonan, Pauline Wee

Illustrations: Marc Pohl, Kevin Makinya Kaunda, Pauline Wee

Animations: Vladimir L. Ochoa-Andrade

Social Media: Anna Vidal Miceli Pohl

Funded by

The Dair Logo. Entagled squares in black with the name next to it.
The logo of the Weizenbaum Institute. Two black backslashes with the institutes name on the right of it.
Logo of Technische Universität Berlin. A black an big TU with the universities name on the left of it.