If you happen to be a government minister making decisions about what questions to include in a #Census, there are some excellent books on categories and category work that are important reading.
Our world is built on categories. Categories have power. And those people for whom there are no categories are dis-empowered, marginalised - and uncounted.
Data Feminism, by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, takes an intersectional feminist view of data analytics, showing how data do not speak for themselves, and how the work of data analysts - category work - is crucial to social change.
https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/
Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star is an exploration of how categories form part of infrastructure, blending into the background, invisibly shaping the world. Bowker and Star show how categories legitimate various things - types of work, types of people.
https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4738/Sorting-Things-OutClassification-and-Its
Categories we Live By: How we classify everyone and everything by Gregory Murphy shows us where categories come from, how they are shaped, and the power they have.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547031/categories-we-live-by/
The government is responsible for "category work" in the census - defining the categories that shape Australia, and the categories that make people invisible - or serve to hide them.
The #Census is category work. And we need better categories.
