Structural Injustice in the Global Data Value Chain

Kebene Wodajo is a senior scientific assistant and lecturer at Ethics, Technology and Society, ETH Zurich. Before taking her current position she was a senior research fellow at the Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen. Her research focuses on questions of social justice with a focus on structural injustice and attribution of responsibility in a technological society. She draws on interdisciplinary perspectives: critical (international) law and technology, critical race theories, Business and Human Rights, and Afro-communitarian philosophy.

This contribution examines the issue of responsibility in the Global Data Value Chain (GDVC) concerning structural injustices. Within this scaffolding, it asks: how do current responsibility frameworks – especially the network-oriented responsibility regime—grapple with the structural risks embedded in the GDVC? Moreover, how might these frameworks be enhanced to account for the deeper structural factors through a duty-oriented ethics? In exploring these questions, it focuses on the function of both law and technology, particularly legal responsibility and the data value chain, within social institutions and their emergent interactions. By embracing a non-essentialist and non-formalist perspective, it examines the key features of the GDVC within the context of the social relations and institutions it mediates, and how these shape the attribution of responsibility for structural injustice in the GDVC.