The data shop is our technologically advanced society, a kingdom that has never been conquered. It’s a society free of disease, poverty, and the ‘isms’ that plague other civilizations across the globe.

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This data shop emphasizes Black narrative traditions and values alternative approaches to data collecting, analysis, and representation while rejecting white-centric only qualitative approaches and honoring the practices of the griots, who were the scholars of African nations.

 

This project challenges participants to elevate Black imaginations and dreams and consider Afrofuturism as qualitative futurity by using Black narrative, Critical, speculative design, and Afrofuturism as an epistemological tool.

 

By centering our focus on Black lives, the project takes into account the ethical duty of researchers to pay attention to the experiences of their participants, not only to better understand our historic and contemporary world, but also to better situate inquiry for what the world of the future and future research could also mean in practice (Toliver, 2021).