[Air-L] EASST-4S Call for Abstracts: Datafied Publics (Due Feb 12)

[Karen Gregory]

Dear AoIR:

Please see our call for abstracts:

https://www.easst4s2024.net/open-panels/#14188

Marres’s term ‘material participation’ describes how objects facilitate
political action through everyday doing and making (2012). It is a useful
theory for thinking about data publics – for instance, people with similar
technical interests who come together to work with datasets and software
toward political ends. We can also use material participation to understand
data publics in another way, by considering how data has “the capacities to
organize publics” under the gaze of data-intensive systems (Ibid p. 9). We
can ask how people politically mobilise when they are subject to commercial
and government data systems that algorithmically govern them but remain
opaque. Such collectives come together as a particular type of data public
– a datafied public – to understand the ways they are sorted, shaped and
targeted and to demand greater control over these processes.

How do datafied publics take shape and what forms of participation do they
engage in? What role do calls for transparency and democratic oversight
play towards actual, substantive political accountability of these systems
(Annany and Crawford 2016)? From health to social security and policing,
the role of datafication in public participation demands renewed
theoretical-empirical attention.

We welcome panelists who look at a range of datafied publics, such as:

• patient populations ‘enriched’ for inclusion in clinical trials

• workers of digital platforms in the gig economy

• groups who are unduly targeted by risk prediction models in social
security and child services

• policing and border control data that target certain communities

• those muted by online platforms for certain content or identities

Ananny, M., & Crawford, K. (2018). Seeing without knowing: Limitations of
the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability.
New Media & Society, 20(3), 973-989.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816676645

Marres, N. (2012). Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and
Everyday Publics. Palgrave Macmillan.


Morgan Currie (University of Edinburgh)
Catherine Montgomery (University of Edinburgh)
Karen Gregory (University of Edinburgh)
Gavin Sullivan (The University of Edinburgh)

-- 

Karen Gregory, PhD

School of Social and Political Science

University of Edinburgh


Recent Publications:


Gallagher, C., Gregory, K., and Karabaliev, B. 2023. Digital Worker
Inquiry: The Critical Potential of Participatory Worker Data Science for
On-Demand Platform Workers.* New Technology, Work & Employment*.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ntwe.12286


Gregory, K. 2022. "The Students are Already Gig Workers" in *Data Justice
and the Right to the City. *University of Edinburgh Press. Open Access
available here:
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-data-justice-and-the-right-to-the-city.html