Toward epistemic justice in socio-scientific decision-making: How youth make sense of lively COVID-19 and vaccines data

Background: Studies of socio-scientific decision-making in times of crisis are in their infancy. This study investigates how minoritized youth engage and make sense of newly developed COVID-19 vaccines and their intersections with the evolving multi-pandemic. Guided by theories of lively data, data sense and epistemic injustice, we center the experience of four Palestinian Arab minority youth in Israel context throughout the ongoing pandemic. Methods: Our analysis of long-form interviews and experience sampling was based on critical grounded theory. We also used counter-narrative to bring witness, capture youth first-hand experience, and recenter marginal knowledge. Findings: Our findings show how youth come to understand the multidimensional nature of the crisis through their first-hand sensory experiences with COVID-19 data. They used their agentic positions with data to make their lively data matter. Their sense- and decision-making shifted as the pandemic and reflected how they understood it as a health hazard, vaccine efficacy, the political, scientific narratives and policies regarding the vaccine. The pandemic proposed solutions resonant with the science they understood and in negotiation with broader context of local, national, and global pandemic data. Contribution: The study offers implications for learning with lively data toward epistemic justice in data science and socio-scientific decision-making.