Data provocations: Disappointing, failing, malfunctioning

Responding to recent calls for the invention of research approaches that move away from traditional humanist notions of research to more situated, performative, and material ways of enacting research, this chapter foregrounds the authors' performative surveillance data practices and shows how disappointing, failing, or malfunctioning data productively helps them to reconsider the notion of 'inadequate' data that might open up new directions for methodology and qualitative research practices. Using a wearable camera called the Autographer as a sur/sousveilling device, Banerjee and Blaise attempt to generate data by walking through a popular shopping district in Hong Kong, hoping to capture 'nativist' attitudes of resentment toward mainland (Chinese) shoppers, thereby enabling the authors to comment on the peculiar nature of postcoloniality in Hong Kong. They show what is possible when surrendering to being out-of-control and resisting the researcher impulse to give life and meaning to data, yields new insights into the paradoxical productiveness of disappointing, failing, and malfunctioning data. Copyright © 2017 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.