This paper explores the implications of having interactions around crises progressively based in data and their infrastructures. Drawing on applied research from multidisciplinary projects to design data infrastructures to support collaboration and situational awareness in crises, we explore how these infrastructures become fundamental to how crisis communication and governance can and does work. In the process, we find they become fundamental to what crisis risk means, as they stabilise risk to make the data visible, actionable, and contestable.
We argue that such work with data, however routine, requires reflexive perspectives that build mechanisms by which actors can be mutually responsive to each other.
