Census and the Administrative State
In this line of work, I explore how the administrative state works, the role of statistical data, and how Jenga politics is tearing the administrative state apart.
Last Updated: June 4, 2026
Census and the Administrative State
Animating Questions
- How are democracy’s data made? State knowledge (statistics).
- What makes state data legitimate? Data quality, community engagement, gift economy.
- How does the state come undone? Jenga politics, politicization, adversarial legalism.
Key Publications
boyd, danah. 2026. Data Are Made, Not Found A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census. University Of Chicago Press.
Liu, Chuncheng. 2026. “The State’s Politics of ‘Fake Data.’” Paper presented at 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), Barcelona, Spain. 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), April 13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790583.
Vertesi, Janet A., and danah boyd. 2024. “The Resource Bind: System Failure and Legitimacy Threats in Sociotechnical Organizations.” Sociologica, March 12, 25-49. https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/18894.
Sarathy, Jayshree, and danah boyd. 2024. “Statistical Imaginaries, State Legitimacy: Grappling With the Arrangements Underpinning Quantification in the U.S. Census.” Critical Sociology, ahead of print, August 21. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205241270898.
boyd, danah, and Jayshree Sarathy. 2022. “Differential Perspectives: Epistemic Disconnects Surrounding the US Census Bureau’s Use of Differential Privacy.” Harvard Data Science Review, ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.66882f0e.
Bouk, Dan, and danah boyd. 2021. “Democracy’s Data Infrastructure: The Technopolitics of the U.S. Census.” Knight First Amendment Institute, March 18. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/democracys-data-infrastructure.
Collaborators
- Dan Bouk (Colgate)
- Chuncheng Liu (Northeastern)
- Jayshree Sarathy (Northeastern)
- Janet Vertesi (Princeton University)