Evelyn Ruppert

Engin Isin, Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP)

Developing a critical perspective on the challenges and possibilities presented by cyberspace, this book explores where and how political subjects perform new rights and duties that govern themselves and others online.

Being Digital Citizens

Stephan Scheel

How EU data practices establish and assign people to categories, and how this matters in enacting--"making up"--Europe as a population and people. What is "Europe" and who are "Europeans"? Data Practices approaches this contemporary political and theoretical question by treating it as a practical problem of counting. Only through the myriad data practices that make up methods such as censuses can EU member states know their national populations, and this in turn is utilized by the EU to understand the population of Europe. But this volume approaches data practices not simply as reflecting populations but as performative in two senses: they simultaneously enact--that is, "make up"--a European population and, by so doing--intentionally or otherwise--also contribute to making up a European people. The book develops a conception of data practices to analyze and interpret findings from collaborative ethnographic multisite fieldwork conducted by an interdisciplinary team of social science researchers as part of a five-year project, Peopling Europe: How Data Make a People. The book focuses on data practices that involve establishing and assigning people to categories and how this matters in enacting Europe as a population and people. Five core chapters explore key categories of people--usual residents, refugees, homeless people, migrants, and ethnic minorities--and how they come into being through specific data practices such as defining, estimating, recalibrating and inferring. Two additional chapters address two key subject positions that data practices produce and require: the data subject and the statistician subject.

Making Up a European People

Data Practices

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.

John Law

How might we think differently? This book is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors are all interested in non-standard modes of knowing. They are all more or less uneasy with the restrictions or the agendas implied by academic modes of knowing, and they have chosen to do this by working with, through, or against one important Western alternative - that of the baroque. Why the baroque? One answer is that the baroque made space for and fostered many forms of otherness. It involved knowing things differently, extravagantly, excessively, and in materially heterogeneous ways, and it apprehended that which is other and could not be caught in a cognitive or symbolic net. It also involved knowing in ways that did not gather into a single point and knew itself to be performative. As part of a great Western division between rationalist and non-rationalist modes of knowing, the baroque is therefore a possible resource for creating ways of knowing differently - a storehouse of possible alternative techniques. To say this is not to say that it is the right mode of knowing. The book's authors do not seek to create a 'baroque social science' whatever that might be, but instead work in a range of ways to explore how drawing on the 'resources of the baroque' can help us to think differently.

Resources from the Baroque

Modes of Knowing

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.

Evelyn Ruppert

Books

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