Evelyn Ruppert

Engin Isin

From the rise of cyberbullying and hactivism to the issues surrounding digital privacy rights and freedom of speech, the Internet is changing the ways in which we govern and are governed as citizens. This book examines how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupting prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, the authors highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts. Rather than assuming that these are static or established “facts” of politics and society, the book shows how the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet inevitably impact upon the action and understanding of political agency. In doing so, it investigates how we conduct ourselves in cyberspace through digital acts. This book provides a new theoretical understanding of what it means to be a citizen today for students and scholars across the social sciences. This new and updated edition includes two new chapters. A Preface consists of reflections on developments in digital politics since the book was published in 2015. It considers how recent major political struggles over digital technologies and data can be understood in relation to the conceptualization of digital citizens that the book offers. While the Preface positions dominant responses to these struggles such as government regulations as ‘closings’, a new final chapter, Digital citizens-yet-to-come offers examples of ‘openings’ – digital acts such as new forms of data activism that are less recognised but which point to the emergence of paradoxical digital acts that are producing new digital political subjectivities.

Being Digital Citizens

The word 'citizen' evokes a particular legacy that is inexorably associated with 'European' values that define especially Euro-American states, such as secularism, democracy, law, and rights. However, since 1945, these very values have been increasingly placed under question from various perspectives, so much so that to call them solely European values is to encounter skepticism. This edited volume takes as its subject the vexed relationship between citizenship and orientalism, each author contemplating ways of re-articulating or re-imagining this relationship. It explores the ways in which we may begin to think differently about citizenship as political subjectivity by presenting the research outcomes of studies conducted at the Open University as part of the Citizenship after Orientalism (Oecumene) project (2010-2014). Collectively, these chapters constitute a critique of citizenship as exclusively and even originally a European institution.

Transforming Political Theory

Citizenship after Orientalism

This edited volume presents a critique of citizenship as exclusively and even originally a European or 'Western' institution. It explores the ways in which we may begin to think differently about citizenship as political subjectivity.

Didier Bigo

Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics. Aimed at academics and postgraduate students interested in political aspects of data, this volume will also be of interest to experts in the fields of internet studies, international studies, Big Data, digital social sciences and humanities.

Engin Isin

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