CFP: Intersectional Automations

This looks like such an important project. I’d love to try and write something, if I hadn’t realised that I’ll never finish my book projects if I don’t stop writing book chapters:

Intersectional Automations: Robotics, AI, Algorithms, and Equity

Edited Collection (Abstracts Due 1 April 2019)

This collection will explore a range of situations where robotics, biotechnological enhancement, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic culture collide with intersectional social justice issues, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and citizenship.

Some call it the 4th industrial revolution (Brinded, 2016; Kaplan, 2015). Robots, AI, and algorithms have grown from their early uptake in some industries (such as robots in manufacturing) to an accelerating presence in other spheres ranging from customer service roles (for example, reception, check-outs, food service, driving) to professional and creative roles previously unheard-of and un-thought-of (for example, expert legal and medical systems, automated journalism, musical and artistic production (Kaplan, 2016; Ramalho, 2017; Hirsch, 2017)). The World Economic Forum warns that “this will lead to a net loss of over 5 million jobs in 15 major developed and emerging economies by 2020” (Brinded, 2016), a serious challenge to ethical labour practices, and potential looming crisis leading some to consider alternative societal models—such as Universal Basic Income (Frase, 2016), or a robot tax (Walker, 2017)—to compensate.

Meanwhile, there is marked evidence that robots, AI, biotechnology, and algorithms are becoming in general and over-top of employment roles more integrated in human societies. Human-machine communication (HMC) has moved from an important yet somewhat-marginal field to lodge itself at the centre of societal workings and visions for the future. From autonomous vehicles (Bowles, 2016), to the algorithmic filtering of search results (Noble, 2018) and social media content (Gillespie, 2018), from online harassment and political boosterism via bots (Dewey, 2016; Woolley, Shorey, & Howard, 2018), to sex robots (Levy, 2007; Danaher & MacArthur, 2017), from ubiquitous AI assistants in our homes and smart devices (Guzman, 2019), to wearable tech that tracks and shares our biometric data (Forlano, 2019) and/or extends our biological capacities (Brooks, 2003; Jones, 2019), such technologies are rapidly mapping themselves onto almost every conceivable realm of human experience.

And yet, there is mounting evidence that the creation and programming of robots, AI, and algorithms, being artifacts of human culture, do not escape that context, sometimes carrying into their computational logics, platforms and/or embodiments stereotypes, biases, exclusions, and other forms of privilege. One can think of True Companion’s Roxxxy sex robots that some argue have personality options based on racist and sexist stereotypes of womenhood, for example the Barely-18 “Young Yoko” and resistant “Frigid Farah” that, as Gildea and Richardson (2017) note, seem to fetishize underage girls and sexual assault. Or you could think of the abandoned Amazon HR algorithm which, after being fed years of resumes and hiring decisions, used computational logic to identify traits that that were historically associated with Amazon hiring decisions, with the view of automating part of the hiring process, and encoded a preexisting sexism from the HR data that showed that applicants with work experience or activities that included the word “Women’s,” or who were educated at all-women colleges, were often not hired (Jones, 2018). Finally, one could contemplate how polities using data aggregation and predictive algorithms to manage and make decisions about social programs, resource allocation, or policing can end up targeting and profiling poor or racialized populations, with occasionally terrifying results—such as any mistake on an online application being interpreted by an automated system as “failure to cooperate” (Eubanks, 2017).

This edited collection will draw an analytical circle around these interconnected and adjacent issues, lending a critical eye to what is at stake due to the automation of aspects of culture. How do equity issues intersect with these fields? Are the pronouncements always already dire, or are there also lines of flight towards more equitable futures in which agentic artefacts and extensions can play an active part? Chapters may address one or multiple equity issues, and submissions that address emergent intersections between them will be given special consideration.

Proposed chapters may address topics such as, but not limited to:

– Algorithmic classism, ableism, racism, and sexism, including issues surrounding content moderation on social media (e.g., Gillespie, 2018), redlining/weblining (e.g., Eubanks, 2017), business (e.g., Jones, 2018), big data (e.g., Ferguson, 2017), or military practices such Google’s controversial Project Maven (e.g., Holt, 2018). Algorithm use to address the same issues.

– Issues around robotic labour and poverty, Universal Basic Income, robotic utopias/dystopias (e.g., Frase, 2016, Kaplan, 2016).

– Issues around the use of deadly autonomous or semi-autonomous robots by the military or non-state actors, such as work surrounding the Campaign Against Killer Robots (e.g., Anderson & Waxman, 2012; Crootof, 2015; Gregory, 2011; Karppi, Bolen, & Granata, 2016).

– Issues surrounding sex-robotics, teledildonics, VR, and AI sexuality, including stereotypical, and sexist sex robotic “personalities” and embodiments (e.g., Gildea & Richardson, 2017); sex robots based on real people without consent (e.g., Gee, 2017); The Campaign Against Sex Robots (e.g., Richardson, 2015; Danaher, Earp, & Sandberg, 2017); teledildonic / VR stream hacking and consent (e.g., Rambukkana & Gautier, 2017; Belamire, 2017); the interplay between robotic brothels and sex worker rights and protests (e.g., Morrish, 2017; Trayner, 2017; Danaher, Earp, & Sandberg, 2017); bots masquerading as real people on dating sites (e.g., Light, 2016; Karppi, 2018); deepfakes and pornography (e.g., Maras & Alexandrou, 2018). Progressive steps to address such issues or to create equitable sexual futures.

– The politics and ethics of the singularity (e.g., Korb & Nicholson, 2012) and the future status of robotic and AI workers with respect to labour, citizenship, and human rights—for example, work on Hansen Robotics’ Sophia as Saudi citizen (e.g., Weller, 2017), robotic servitude (e.g., Green, 2016), as well as the rights of humans interacting with AI (e.g., Shepherd, 2019).

– Assumptions, representations, and discourse surrounding dis/ability and human augmentics, including “supercrip” and “cyborg” discourses and the potential tensions between feminist technoscience (e.g., Haraway, 1990) and critical disability studies (e.g., Allan, 2016; Cascais, 2013).

– How any of these or other issues are depicted in popular or fringe fictions that contain robotic or AI characters (for example, Humans, Neuromancer, Extant, Westworld, Her, Blade Runner, Ex Machina,Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, Black Mirror, Speak, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Questionable Content, etc.)

My goal is to assemble a collection of exemplary abstracts and then approach some top-tier academic publishers with relevant series.

If interested, please send a 750-word abstract, collection of keywords, and a 150-word bio to the editor, Dr. Nathan Rambukkana (n_rambukkana@complexsingularities.net), by 1 April 2019. Drafts will be due 1 October 2019 and final versions 1 April 2020. Please also email Nathan at the above address if you have any questions and feel free to repost this CFP to your networks.

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“We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.” — Michel Foucault

Fascinating call for papers on infrastructural politics

This looks like a really exciting special issue, not least of all for being in a cultural studies journal. It will be interesting to see how people respond to this and the extent to which it ends up containing internet research with a little bit of cultural studies tacked on.

Call for Papers:

Special Issue of *Cultural Studies *on Infrastructural Politics
Issue Editors:
Blake Hallinan – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder
James N. Gilmore – Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Clemson University
John Durham Peters’ 2015 book *The Marvelous Clouds* develops the concept *infrastructuralism *to describe a fascination “for the basic, the boring, the mundane, and all
the mischievous work done behind the scenes” that contributes to a sense of the unremarkable (p. 34). Classic studies explored electric power (Hughes, 1988) and transportation systems (Innis, 1950), while more recent academic work has explored the unremarkable systems that have been architected to help sustain and form information technologies, including Nicole history of undersea cables (2015), Eden Medina’s history of cybernetic systems in Allende’s Chile (2011), and Benjamin Peters’ history of the Soviet Internet (2017). Relatedly, there have been a growing number of calls to recognize the centrality of data for forming subjectivities and organizing the world (Striphas, 2011; van Dijck, 2013; Andrejevic, Hearn and Kennedy, 2015; Pasquale, 2015; Beer, 2016; O’Neil, 2016; Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Tufekci, 2017; Vaidhyanathan, 2018; Bowker, 2018; Noble, 2018; Plantin *et al.*, 2018). These and other studies demonstrate that significant attention needs to be paid to the design and implementation of material and immaterial data infrastructures, infrastructures that help make possible the production, dissemination, and circulation of culture.

Infrastructure is never simply a neutral conduit or platform; it always has a politics, shaping the arrangements of power and authority in human associations and the activities within those arrangements (Winner, 1986).
Generally, the point of infrastructure is to be constructive and supportive, but what exactly is being constructed and supported is not always so readily apparent. As work on socio-technical systems has shown, understanding the significance of technology requires attention to the technology itself but also to the ways technology enrolls people, places, systems, and interests. This broader understanding of the politics of platforms has been adopted by academic researchers (Gillespie, 2010, 2017), while simultaneously animating the aspirations of many leading technology companies—consider Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of creating a global community atop the foundation of Facebook as a prominent example (Zuckerberg, 2017; Swisher, 2018). Understanding, for instance, the construction of social networking sites alongside communities connects arrangements of data to arrangements of power and draws attention to related issues of ownership, access, transparency, accountability, accuracy, justice, and control, and how these arrangements shift over time and across contexts (Bowker and Star, 1999; Couldry and van Dijck, 2015; Pasquale, 2015; Peters, 2015, p. 2; van Doorn, 2017).

We seek contributions for a special issue of *Cultural Studies *exploring the relationships between data, infrastructure, and politics, and how those relationships affect the study of culture. Cultural Studies can significantly address and engage the growing challenges of such a “constructive politics of infrastructures.” Cultural Studies’ investment in the articulation of politics, culture, and “everything that is not culture” (Thompson, 1961) provides an important—and, to date, underutilized—framework for analyzing the degree to which data, technologies, and infrastructures are rearticulating configurations of power and affecting lived experience.

Potential contributors to this volume should submit a 500-word abstract outlining their object(s) of study, their research approach, and how their potential article draws on and extends the traditions, approaches, and projects of Cultural Studies.

When submitting a proposal, please include name, affiliation, and contact information in the document, and send submissions as a PDF to co-editors

Blake Hallinan (blake.hallinan@colorado.edu) and James N. Gilmore (jngilmo@clemson.edu).

Submissions should be received by November 15, 2018 for review. Authors will be notified if proposals are accepted within a month of the deadline.

If accepted, full articles will be provisionally due to the special issue editors by July 15, 2019. In order to be deemed publishable in the special issue, all articles will undergo both editorial and blind peer review. All articles must adhere to the *formatting requirements*

<https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rcus20&page=instructions#Style_guidelines> of *Cultural Studies *to avoid rejection.

Please direct all queries or concerns ahead of submission to both special issue editors.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

· Infrastructuralism as a way of thinking, distinct from structuralism, post-structuralism, and other relevant intellectual movements

· Infrastructure’s implications for state politics, elections, protest movements, and other modes of political activism

· How marginalized groups utilize infrastructure to mobilize resistive politics.

· How data-based digital technologies challenge the epistemology of media and cultural studies

· The relationship between network infrastructures and colonization projects around the globe

· Media ecological studies that position cultural politics alongside environmental issues

· The infrastructures of emergent surveillance systems, such as Amazon’s facial recognition program

· How the mundanity of infrastructure relates to larger operations of power and authority

Where do data scientists come from?

A few years ago, I was preoccupied by this question after an illuminating six months working in the Data Science Lab at Warwick Business School. I co-organised a ground breaking conference in computational social science and it was clear this represented a mode of expertise distinct from what I had previously been familiar with as someone whose academic life had been spent until then in philosophy and sociology departments. It made different claims and responded to different concerns, leading to analyses which were radically extensive but lacking in intensivity. However what interested me more were the human factors associated with it, the distinctive stylings and presentations I could see amongst people who identified as data scientists. It struck me as a fascinating category, doing a great deal of work while remaining under defined. It could be performed in a wide range of ways, while there remained characteristics which most data scientists seemed to share. It placed intellectual issues in the foreground while there nonetheless seemed to be an emerging ethos uniting people who identified as data scientists, even if it might only have been partially articulated.

What did it mean to be a data scientist? How did the identity motivate people? How did these feed back into the occupational category and the role this played within data driven organisations? These are questions which haven’t been on my mind for a while but I was reminded of them today when reading about DJ Patil, the first chief data scientist in the US government. This was the account he gave to Michael Lewis on pg 155 of the Fifth Risk, describing how the category of ‘data scientist’ emerged amidst the data tsunami of the last decade. A range of titles and roles had emerged which packaged up emerging competencies related to data in different ways. According to DJ Patil the impulse to unify these under the master category of ‘data scientist’ was bureaucratic, reflecting a managerial discomfort with an explosion of new categories within their organisations:

Along with much more: in the space of a few years, the interest in data analysis went from curiosity to fad. The fetish for data overran everything from political campaigns to the management of baseball teams. Inside LinkedIn, DJ presided over an explosion of job titles that described similar tasks: analyst, business analyst, data analyst, research sci. The people in human resources complained to him that the company had too many data-related job titles. The company was about to go public, and they wanted to clean up the organization chart. To that end DJ sat down with his counterpart at Facebook, who was dealing with the same problem. What could they call all these data people? “Data scientist,” his Facebook friend suggested. “We weren’t trying to create a new field or anything, just trying to get HR off our backs,” said DJ. He replaced the job titles for some openings with “data scientist.” To his surprise, the number of applicants for the jobs skyrocketed. “Data scientists” were what people wanted to be. In the fall of 2014 someone from the White House called him. Obama was coming to San Francisco and wanted to meet with him.

Exploring the interplay between organisations creating roles for ‘data scientists’ and individuals coming to identify as such would make a fascinating project. How have the role of the “analyst, business analyst, data analyst, research sci” and the people performing them changed in the process? For instance consider the description on Pg 172-174 of the intellectual project which the creation of chief data scientist in the US government sought to advance:

DJ Patil had gone to Washington in 2014 to help people find that gold. He was the human expression of an executive order Obama had signed the year before, insisting that all unclassified government data be made publicly available and that it be machine-readable. DJ assumed he’d need to leave when the man who hired him left office, so that gave him just two years. “We did not have time to collect new data,” he said. “We were just trying to open up what we had.”

How do these organisational projects shape how the data scientists involved see their purpose? How do these projects contribute to a sense of data science as a vocation beyond the organisation in question? How should we revise our conception of organisations if all those beyond a certain size will have data scientists within their ranks? There are many questions which can be asked here and investigating the role itself would be an interesting route into them.

Socialising the machines

I’m saving these two CfPs for my own reference but I suspect others might find them interesting:

Call for Papers

Envisioning Social Robotics: Current Challenges and New Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Special issue of Interaction Studies
Guest Editors: Glenda Hannibal & Astrid Weiss

Submission Deadline: November 1st, 2018

We find in social robotics many so-called “wicked problems” – problems that are extremely complex and resist complete definition and resolution. To work out these problems, it is necessary to critically discuss the underpinning logic, or line of reasoning, that motivates social robotics and to develop new interdisciplinary methods to make social robots more “socially robust”. This special issue aims to address current challenges in social robotics by bringing methodological discussions to the foreground and therefore calls for submissions focusing on new methodologies in social robotics by reflecting on, developing, and demonstrating interdisciplinary research. Researchers with various disciplinary backgrounds and professions (e.g. engineering, physiotherapy, philosophy, law, biology, art, STS, psychology, medicine, HRI, sociology, computer science, nursing, industry, education, anthropology, HCI, management etc.) are strongly encouraged to contribute.

Successful submissions to the special issue should therefore focus on (a) defining current challenges from a methodological point of view and (b) presenting in response different models, approaches or methods for interdisciplinary social robotics. If possible, c) they should also provide illustrations of implementation of the suggested model, approach or method with a critical discussion thereof. All articles will be peer-reviewed.

Authors should consider the interdisciplinary readership of INTERACTION STUDIES and prepare their manuscripts accordingly. Authors may either submit full papers or short research reports. See the journal’s homepage for guidelines on the suggested length and formatting of the manuscripts: https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/is/guidelines

Please submit the journal manuscript(s) via the online submission platform provided by Interaction Studies: https://www.editorialmanager.com/is/default.aspx

Remember to select the name of the special issue when submitting the manuscript(s).

For more information please contact Glenda Hannibal at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) at glenda.hannibal@tuwien.ac.at.

And the other one:

The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies
Preconference Workshop, #AoIR2018 Montréal, Canada
Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre, INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique)
Wednesday October 10th 2018

Machine learning (ML), deep neural networks, differentiable programming and related contemporary novelties in artificial intelligence (AI) are all leading to the development of an ambiguous yet efficient narrative promoting the dominance of a scientific field—as well as a ubiquitous business model. Indeed, AI is very much in full hype mode. For its advocates, it represents a ‘tsunami’ (Manning, 2015) or ‘revolution’ (Sejnowski, 2018)—terms indicative of a very performative and promotional, if not self-fulfilling, discourse. The question, then, is: how are the social sciences and humanities to dissect such a discourse and make sense of all its practical implications? So far, the literature on algorithms and algorithmic cultures has been keen to explore both their broad socio-economic, political and cultural repercussions, and the ways they relate to different disciplines, from sociology to communication and Internet studies. The crucial task ahead is understanding the specific ways by which the new challenges raised by ML and AI technologies affect this wider framework. This would imply not only closer collaboration among disciplines—including those of STS for instance—but also the development of new critical insights and perspectives. Thus a helpful and precise pre-conference workshop question could be: what is the best way to develop a fine-grained yet encompassing field under the name of Critical AI Studies? We propose to explore three regimes in which ML and 21st-century AI crystallize and come to justify their existence: (1) epistemology, (2) agency, and (3) governmentality—each of which generates new challenges as well as new directions for inquiries.

In terms of epistemology, it is important to recognize that ML and AI are situated forms of knowledge production, and thus worthy of empirical examination (Pinch and Bijker, 1987). At present, we only have internal accounts of the historical development of the machine learningfield, which increasingly reproduce a teleological story of its rise (Rosenblatt, 1958) and fall (Minsky and Papert 1968; Vapnik 1998) and rise (Hinton 2006), concluding with the diverse if as-yet unproven applications of deep learning. Especially problematic in this regard is our understanding of how these techniques are increasingly hybridized with large-scale training datasets, specialized graphics-processing hardware, and algorithmic calculus. The rationale behind contemporary ML finds its expression in a very specific laboratory culture (Forsythe 1993), with a specific ethos or model of “open science”. Models trained on the largest datasets of private corporations are thus made freely available, and subsequently détourned for the new AI’s semiotic environs of image, speech, and text—promising to make the epistemically recalcitrant landscapes of unruly and ‘unstructured’ data newly “manageable”.

As the knowledge-production techniques of ML and AI move further into the fabric of everyday life, it creates a particularly new form of agency. Unlike the static, rule-based systems critiqued in a previous generation by Dreyfus (1972), modern AI models pragmatically unfold as a temporal flow of decontextualized classifications. What then does agency mean for machine learners (Mackenzie, 2017)? Performance in this particular case relates to the power of inferring and predicting outcomes (Burell, 2016); new kinds of algorithmic control thus emerge at the junction of meaning-making and decision-making. The implications of this question are tangible, particularly as ML becomes more unsupervised and begins to impact on numerous aspects of daily life. Social media, for instance, are undergoing radical change, as insightful new actants come to populate the world: Echo translates your desires into Amazon purchases, and Facebook is now able to detect suicidal behaviours. In the general domain of work, too, these actants leave permanent traces—not only on repetitive tasks, but on the broader intellectual responsibility.

Last but not least, the final regime to explore in this preconference workshop is governmentality. The politics of ML and AI are still largely to be outlined, and the question of power for these techniques remains largely unexplored. Governmentality refers specifically to how a field is organised—by whom, for what purposes, and through which means and discourses (Foucault, 1991). As stated above, ML and AI are based on a model of open science and innovation, in which public actors—such as governments and universities—are deeply implicated (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000). One problem, however, is that while the algorithms themselves may be openly available, the datasets on which they rely for implementation are not—hence the massive advantages for private actors such as Google or Facebook who control the data, as well as the economic resources to attract the brightest students in the field. But there is more: this same open innovation model makes possible the manufacture of military AI with little regulatory oversight, as is the case for China, whose government is currently helping to fuel an AI arms race (Simonite 2017). What alternatives or counter-powers could be imagined in these circumstances? Could ethical considerations stand alone without a proper and fully developed critical approach to ML and AI? This workshop will try to address these pressing and interconnected issues.

We welcome all submissions which might profitably connect with one or more of these three categories of epistemology, agency, and governmentality; but we welcome other theoretically and/or empirically rich contributions.

Interested scholars should submit proposal abstracts, of approximately 250 words, by 11:59pm EDT on June 30th, 2018 to CriticalAI2018 [at] gmail [dot] com. Proposals may represent works in progress, short position papers, or more developed research. The format of the workshop will focus on paper presentations and keynotes, with additional opportunities for group discussion and reflection.

This preconference workshop will be held at the Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre of INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique). The Centre is located at 385 Sherbrooke St E, Montreal, QC, and is about a 20-minute train ride from the Centre Sheraton on the STM Orange Line (enter at the Bonaventure stop, exit at Sherbrooke), or about a 30-minute walk along Rue Sherbrooke.

For information on the AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers) conference, see https://aoir.org/aoir2018/ ; for other preconference workshops at AoIR 2018, see https://aoir.org/aoir2018/preconfwrkshop/.

Organizers: Jonathan Roberge (INRS), Michael Castelle (University of Warwick), and Thomas Crosbie (Royal Danish Defence College).

Defending the social at #undisciplining

Notes for the closing panel at Undisciplining

Today’s session has a twofold purpose. It’s intended as a celebration of the paper which was awarded The Sociological Review’s prize for outstanding scholarship last year. But it’s also a continuation of the opening session, extending the discussion while introducing some new elements. It can perform both these roles because this incisive and powerful paper, authored by Val Gillies, Ros Edwards and Nicola Horsley speaks with such force and insight to the themes animating this conference.

Unfortunately Ros can’t join us today due to illness but we’re pleased to welcome Val and Nicola for a discussion about this work. The format for today is a fireside chat, a structure common in technology conferences which may or not may not work in an academic setting – like everything else here it’s an experiment. I’ll have a conversation with Val and Nicola about this work, as well as the larger project of which it is part. Then our editor Marie-Andrée Jacob and trustee Roger Burrows offer some reflections before we open out the discussion to include the audience, in as natural a way as is possible within such a large and imposing room.

The prize winning paper is Brave new brains: sociology, family and the politics of knowledge. It explores how the impulse towards dialogue and collaboration with the life sciences might inadvertently buttress a contraction of social horizons, as theoretical and methodological trends flows downstream through the mediation of social policy and social intervention. I was an immediate enthusiast for this paper in spite of the relative unfamiliarity of the subject matter to me. I was interested in the question of the biological as a recurrent issue within sociological thought, but had only encountered this at a certain level of historical detail or philosophical abstraction.

What I found so gripping about this elegantly written and argued paper was its capacity to retain these levels in the same frame of reference while expanding beyond them. It looks at how the cultural influence of popular biology can converge with the intellectual prestige of the life sciences to support a politics many in this room would object to. One which remains opaque if we reduce the issue of the biosocial to methodological or theoretical considerations. The conception of the social we intellectually endorse might nonetheless get chipped away at through the accumulating consequences of our practical decisions. What happens to the social when sociologists work across these frontiers? How do intellectual changes contribute to the reconfiguration of social realities?

Though their concern is with the biological as a frontier of sociological inquiry, I felt it nonetheless shed light on what we can also see with the digital. Here the challenge of transactional data invites and incites projects of disciplinary transformation. One which might also have social and political ramifications downstream, susceptible to sociological analysis yet too rarely subject to it. Much as the embrace of the biosocial risks leaving us with an eviscerated conception of social life, in a world of ‘big data’ people begin to be reduced to the behavioural traces which register through digital platforms.

Their might be other frontiers as well and this is why I felt the paper spoke so powerfully to the themes of the conference. What are the risks of undisciplining? How might pragmatic adaptations to the realities of work across boundaries leave us underselling ourselves or failing to value our own intellectual contribution? Can we retain an honesty about the political economy we work within, recognising how the incentives we confront and the values we embrace both shape our intellectual trajectories? How do we remain aware of the downstream consequences of our work? How do we remain clear about the character of the social and the consequences of conflicting conceptions of it to be found at these frontiers? Do we need to defend the social?

Sociology as a discipline doesn’t have a monopoly on the sociological. But what happens when the disciplinary interests of sociology lead sociologists to take action which is detrimental to the sociological? What’s good for the discipline, in terms of funding and prestige, might not be good for the project of understanding social life. What does this mean for undisciplining and what resources can we find in sociological thought to negotiate these challenges?

These are just some of the issue I hope we’ll touch on in today’s fireside chat. But the place to begin is to talk to the authors about how this superb paper came about and to find out more about the broader project of which it is only one part.

These are the questions I’m planning to ask:

To begin with, could you tell us how this paper came about? How does it fit into the larger research project you’ve worked on?
How is the social now invoked within the life sciences? Is this an adequate conception of social life when considered from the perspective of sociology or anthropology?
You use the notion of ‘early years intervention’ to establish why we should be cautious about this embrace of the biosocial. What is this and what does it tell us?
The family has become a key site in which the biosocial and the political meet. How has this come about? What can we learn from it for understanding how the life sciences and sociology can interact?
You talk of the life sciences as being funnelled through a neoliberal politics of the social. Is there why is still such widespread sociological suspicion of the life sciences?

Big data, human agency, critical realism and the future of the social sciences

I’m doing a webinar tomorrow as part of the Critical Realism Network series which I’m really looking forward to. It draws together much of my work, encompassing my contributions to the Centre for Social Ontology’s social morphogenesis and humanism projects, the Accelerated Academy, the Digital Social Science project I ran for the ISRF, my applied and theoretical work on social media, my ongoing monograph on The Distracted People of Digital Capitalism and my work on the Platform University project at Cambridge.

During this time, I’ve been circling round questions which I’m only now beginning to address head on and putting this together was a really helpful opportunity to try and draw these threads together, even if the result feels more provisional than I hoped it would be. Underpinning much of this is the notion of personal morphogenesis (the topic of my PhD) and what it means once digitalisation becomes ubiquitous. In this sense, the whole line of inquiry began with critical realism and I’m realising bringing it to a conclusion will involve coming back to critical realism, after a few years of drifting away because the people talking about the things I was interested in were mainly elsewhere.

Big data, human agency, critical realism and the future of the social sciences from Mark Carrigan

Digital social science as a meta-field

For the last few years, I’ve taken to talking about digital social science. I mean this partly as a short-hand to refer to a whole range of (sub)disciplines and (sub)fields which have emerged in response to the challenge of ‘the digital’: data science, computational social science, web science, internet studies, digital sociology, digital anthropology, digital geography, data studies, software studies, platform studies, algorithm studies. But I also mean it as an umbrella term to refer to where this field formation could lead. I’ve found this a difficult topic to explore and the most developed statement I’ve managed is this short talk at an event last year:

I was immensely excited to read this post by Jeff Pooley, as it pursues an overlapping line of thought and does so with a great deal more clarity than I’ve thus far managed:

There’s a new academic meta-field, centered on digital life, that doesn’t look anything like a traditional discipline. The field is more like an estuary, fed by a number of existing disciplines—library and information science, law, sociology, science and technology studies, and communication. It’s an interdisciplinary mashup of fields whose domains (“media”, “information,” “technology”) have merged.

There’s nothing surprising about the intellectual momentum: rapid social change always calls attention to itself. Ambitious scholars mix with curious benefactors, writers trade alarmist and upbeat takes, and initiatives get launched. The modern social sciences, in the U.S. at least, emerged as a sense-making response to late 19th-century social churn. A society on the move is always throwing its novelty into relief; yesterday’s order makes today feel weird. So we would expect the last two decades of unending digital upheavel to generate an academic echo.

What makes the new, nameless formation interesting is its place in the university: the new field is seeded by institutes that—crucially—exist outside the established department system. It is a resolutely cross-disciplinary field, whose brick-and-mortar centers, like Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, are designed for idea exchange. The academics who populate the field, they reside in established departments and schools; it’s when they have thinking to share that they travel to Cambridge or to one of the other institutes.

So what’s formed over the last two decades is an extra-departmental crossroads. Lightly staffed centers, with few standing faculty, welcome a rotating cast of visiting speakers and affiliated fellows. Sharply designed, public-facing reports, perhaps open source tools and a podcast series—these are the centers’ main outputs.

The new digital-studies institutes have flourished at elite universities—like Harvard and Oxford—that could never really stomach the idea of training journalists or librarians. Communication research and library science were sneered at for their vocational grubbiness. Berkman and the Oxford Internet Institute are, in that sense, an institutional end-run around the student-supported disciplines that employ the bulk of their visitors and fellows.

http://culturedigitally.org/2018/03/the-post-program-era-the-rise-of-internet-society-centers-and-a-new-interdiscipline/

He offers a careful account of how this meta-field has emerged, as well as the challenges it faces as the conditions which gave rise to it themselves undergo change. There’s more to the digital social sciences than the institutional spaces he describes but this thoughtful and insightful post has helped bring clarity to issues that were still frustratingly unclear in my mind despite having thoughts about them for so long.

Xerox PARC and the challenge of building a community of inquiry

In TroubleMakers, Leslie Berlin offers a gripping account of the formation of Xerox PARC. This famous lab was responsible for a dizzying array of innovations, listed on Wikipedia as including “laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI) and desktop paradigm, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, electronic paper, amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications, and advancing very-large-scale integration (VLSI) for semiconductors.” It raises the obvious question of how the features of the organisation facilitated innovation which such regularity and it seems there was much in its planning from which contemporary universities could learn a lot. From pg 92:

Goldman proposed that Xerox locate the research center in a university town with an “intellectual night life” that would attract and benefit researchers. Within the center, he envisioned three laboratories to target basic sciences, systems science, and computer science. He also had a few specific ideas for future products that might emerge from the labs—“ a machine which is half xerographic printer and half computing machine,” for example. But the essence of his plan could be distilled to seven words: hire great researchers and leave them alone. He told Xerox’s top management to expect nothing useful from PARC for at least five years.

PARC relied on its relationship to the university, offering the virtues of an academic life without the vices traditionally associated with it. As she goes on to write on pg 97,

PARC also offered high salaries and excellent resources. PARC researchers could easily interact with others at SRI and Stanford, particularly the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). They could attend or give talks on campus, or meet with people visiting one of the other institutions. Several of the researchers from Taylor’s lab taught classes at Stanford. A job at PARC offered the intellectual stimulation of an academic career without teaching or publication demands.

Berlin paints a rich picture of a profoundly collegial environment, orientated towards enabling the creativity of the researchers and removing barriers upon its exercise through a process of community-building amongst people who nonetheless tended to be ardent individualists. From pg 97:

There was only one inviolable administrative requirement in Taylor’s lab. Once each week, everyone had to be in the beanbag room for a meeting. Taylor did not care when his researchers got to work or what they wore while there. It did not matter when they went to lunch or whether they shaved. But he wanted them in the beanbag room every Tuesday—and he expected them to stay for hours. The meetings served as the intellectual pulse of the lab and a way for him to keep the team moving in the same direction. The gatherings also reveal the inner workings of what both Thacker and Lampson have described as Taylor’s “magical” leadership. Taylor opened the sessions with administrative issues such as available billets and announcements of upcoming visitors. He then moved on to solicit project reports and ask for social announcements. Many members of the group, young and single, biked together in the hills or grabbed lunch at the Alpine Inn (fondly called “Zotts”) in the rural town of Portola Valley, a few miles from PARC. Researchers shared long weekend hikes among the coastal trees in the misty coolness above the valley. They barbecued at one another’s houses and worked on one another’s basement workshop projects. Taylor, a competitive tennis player, enjoyed challenging the best players at PARC to hard-core, sweat-streaming matches on the court behind his neighbor’s home. Afterward, the players would adjourn to Taylor’s house. “The Dr Pepper was cold, the doors were open, a breeze was blowing through, and everyone was always welcome to come in,” recalls Bob Metcalfe. 27

This required a great deal of creative management, some of which could be more accurately described as indulgence. But it served a purpose and created an environment in which scientists experience themselves as working autonomously towards collectively-derived ends, freed from the institutional pressures they would otherwise subject to because of Taylor’s careful and forceful mediation of the wider corporate environment within which PARC was embedded. From pg 98:

Taylor listened and took careful notes. He knew that truly creative computer scientists tend to be opinionated individualists. He catered to that tendency. When the group was preparing to move to a new building, he polled every researcher to determine the ideal phone system. All twenty researchers wanted Touch-Tone phones rather than the old-fashioned rotary dial, but beyond that, there was little consistency. One did not want any secretarial backup, but nine wanted the so-called Alan Kay switch that transferred incoming calls immediately to an attendant without interrupting the intended recipient. Five shunned the message waiting light, while seven wanted an intercom line. 28 Customized phones may seem trivial, but they are an example of a feeling that Taylor created at PARC—the sense that he was working for the researchers, rather than the other way around. Every week, once the social and administrative housekeeping were out of the way, Taylor brought the group to the heart of the meeting. “A time for half-baked ideas,” he called the sessions. A researcher would present work in front of a blackboard and set all the rules of engagement. Could he be interrupted with questions? V Were people allowed to interject at all? Would he talk for an hour and invite discussion for two more? Or would he toss out only a few ideas before opening the floor? Taylor called the featured presenter the “dealer” because the speaker set the terms much as a dealer sets out the rules of a poker game. Soon enough, the meetings themselves came to be called Dealers.

Social listening and reclaiming the future

The dynamics of discipline formation

As anyone reading this blog regularly will be aware, I’m very interested in the dynamics of discipline formation and the implications they have for the capacity of the social sciences to respond to changing circumstances. There are a variety of mechanisms which emerge from organised knowledge production and operate to ensure that this activity fails to be organised in a way which is a reasoned and optimal response to the reality they seek to generate knowledge of. One of these mechanisms can be branching, as new sub disciplines emerge from the same root in a manner which leaves assumptions and practices being reproduced or resisted in a path-dependent fashion: reevaluation of practice becomes difficult when everything is shaped as much by responding to where a sub discipline has come from as it is by the present reality the field confronts. Another mechanism is externalisation, as objects get cast out from a discipline in all manner of ways, never to return in part because they became incorporated into the remit of a continuous discipline. There is an interesting example of this described on loc 4644 of John Scott and Ray Bromley’s Envisioning Sociology:

A key feature of their sociology was its emphasis on the “region,” which was the means through which they were able to theorize the effects of the natural environment on human activities. This very contemporary focus on environmental issues was largely absent from Hobhouse’s view of sociology. While it was fundamental to the work of MacIver and, through him, became a central element in the textbook tradition through which students were trained in sociology (see Scott 2013), it barely figured in the professional practice and research of those who entered academic sociology. Despite the production of a number of “community studies,” a consideration of the environment was largely left to the geographers. Geddes and Branford saw this differently and in ways that are far more in accord with the contemporary concern for environmental issues in sociology.

Does anyone know of an attempt to list these mechanisms? If not, I might undertake it as a blogging exercise, providing examples of each and throwing them out to stimulate debate. My interest in them is predominately practical, as I’m curious about how we can hack these processes to better equip discipline formation for the challenges I can refer vacuously to in brief as ‘the digital’ and ‘the biosocial’. Any ideas about how to pursue this line of thought would be very welcome.

Social listening and the black health economy

In his The New Poverty, Stephen Armstrong introduces the disturbing case of DIY dentistry. These practices are clearly growing yet the methodological incapacity of existing approaches means there’s little to no systemic evidence about this growth. From loc 863-882:

Accurate figures on the extent of DIY dentistry are hard to find. One of the biggest sellers of dental first aid kits, DenTek, shifts over 250,000 kits a year, but there’s no research on how people use the kit. In researching this book I met people in Hartlepool, Merthyr Tydfil and Bristol who had worked on their own mouths with these kits. In 2012, research from the oral health charity the British Dental Health Foundation found that one in five Britons would remove a tooth themselves or ask a friend to do so if they couldn’t afford dental treatment. The Foundation hasn’t followed this up, explains its dental advisor Karen Coates, because ‘all of the stuff that we have is anecdotal’. And yet any and all figures on DIY dentistry and the black health economy will necessarily be anecdotal, according to John Wildman, professor of health economics at Newcastle University. The way we gather health data relies on surveys and GP-based patient interaction. ‘People at the lower end of the distribution curve –on big housing estates in the north-east, for instance –are effectively completely unreported,’ he explained. ‘They don’t take part in surveys and they don’t go in to GP surgeries. Which is why you have a situation where people in the north-east have gaps in their teeth and are resorting to DIY dentistry while at the other end of the scale there are people for whom toothpaste isn’t even about fighting infection –it’s about making their teeth whiter. It’s crazy.’

This immediately left me wondering whether digital social research, specifically conducted as social listening, might prove effective. Are there conversations taking place about these practices in publicly available forums? Are there reviews about the different kits which are available? Are there support resources which have been created to guide people through these processes? I’d be curious to know if anyone has examples of digital social research into the black health economy.

Emerging technologies, academic celebrities and the social organisation of disciplines

In his contribution to the Centre for Social Ontology’s workshop on human enhancement, Doug Porpora presented his initial results from an analysis of the emerging literature on human enhancement. He observed that this literature is scattered throughout many journals across disciplines, rather than featuring in the central journals of any one discipline. This left me wondering whether this is uniformly true of emerging technologies, reflecting something important about this category and the difficulty which our our existing organisation of scholarly inquiry has in coping with it. If a new technology has significant emerging implications, it will often fit poorly within our existing structures of inquiry which in turn has conditions how it plays out in relation to (partial or absent) specialist knowledge

For any given emerging technology, it would be interesting to examine who is cited across this scattered literature. My hunch is we will see a number of academic celebrities (people such as Bruno Latour or Donna Haraway) whose work has been picked up at the peripheries of many different disciplines. This tendency further adds to their visibility, rendering it more likely they will be picked up by others working at emerging frontiers. Looking at this in a systematic would involve identifying and analysing the commonalities and differences in the way such thinkers are drawn upon. Their work plays a crucial role in how the gap between concerned disciplines develops, either facilitating mutual exchange or furthering the fragmentation. However my suspicion is that this represents another vector through which the (dis)organisation of the contemporary academy undermines our capacity to identify, understand and steer the social life of emerging technologies.

CfP: Co-design Special Issue – Repositioning CoDesign in the age of platform capitalism: from sharing to caring

CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts

Contribute to our special issue on “Repositioning Codesign in the Age of Platform Capitalism: From Sharing to Caring”

http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/est/jmi02301-nsdn-si-sept-2017/

Potential authors should contact the guest editors at codesignsharingcaring@m-iti.org<mailto:codesignsharingcaring@m-iti.org> with any questions about the Special Issue.

In this special issue, we are calling for contributions which discuss how co-design is positioning itself in the age of “platform capitalism” (Snricek, 2016). We are looking for both theoretical reflections on the position of co-design and empirical cases of co-design which can shed better light on these dynamics.

Digital platforms, often labelled as part of the “sharing economy”, are becoming increasingly relevant to both the daily lives of private individuals and to the direction and operation of social and political systems. As these tools transform various communities (of interest, place, practice, and circumstance) to establish new forms of connection, welfare, labour, and service, there emerge fundamental questions around the perils of their design and use and the possibilities for thinking about fair alternatives.
Two narratives on the sharing economy tend to dominate the current discourse. One group of accounts focuses on social innovation, creating more sustainable economic and environmental models in which sharing access to goods and services allows for a more efficient and sustainable utilisation of resources. The second group centres on the idea of market-focused digital innovation radically changing business models and generating economic activity, often threatening the working conditions of other social groups (e.g. Uber and the taxi drivers) or the texture of local communities (e.g. the effect of AirBnB on the rental market).

In both cases, a prominent role is played by platforms that seek to quantify collaborations for purposes of profit, labelled as platform capitalism by Snricek (2016). For example, likes and other emoticon-based responses to a Facebook post are often used as quantitative measure of the post’s impact and success of engagement. Through algorithmic filtering, these become the measure of our affective, political, and cultural identities and guides for further design of our experiences on the platform.
In fact, digital platforms are connective and collaborative, creating a digital action point where multiple networks meet. These qualities have been enhanced through the development of on-site collaborative features. However, with the impact of venture capital in the market and increasingly driven by financial motives, many platforms have been adjusting their algorithms in order to commodify collaboration. Hence, novel forms of exploitation (of social relations as well as labour) have been established (van Dijck, 2013).

Co-design, as well as other related domains of research and practice, such as Participatory Design and Computer Supported Cooperative Work, starts from a perspective where collaboration is valued for both its politics and what it can deliver, for instance, supporting emancipation of workers from the capitalist production process (Ehn, 1989). These approaches stress the importance of collaborative design and production of technologies, places, and services with a hopeful speculation that designing collaboratively will increase the impact and use value of the designed things and the quality of life for the people using them, in what is called “design for future use” (Ehn, 2008). It thus become relevant to ask how these approaches position themselves with regard to the challenges posed by platform capitalism, associated with commodification and quantification of collaboration.

A possible direction might be placing attention on the commons (Ostrom, 1990; Hess and Ostrom, 2007) as collectively managed and shared resources, or the common (Hardt and Negri, 2009; Dardot and Laval, 2014) as the ensemble of the material and symbolic resources tying together human beings. These concepts may be indeed central for the positioning of co-design and participatory design in the age of platform capitalism, especially for connecting with the original emancipatory intent of these design and research practices (Teli et al., 2017).

Another direction may be the relationship that exists between the subjects involved in co-designing, and the object of the action. When this relationship manifests itself as structuring social relations, these relations can be referred to as a kind of care (Light and Akama, 2014). With this perspective, highly networked economic relations could leave behind the misleading narratives on the “sharing economy” promoted by platform capitalism, and engage in structuring a caring economy, oriented toward nurturing respectful and ever-transforming collaboration (Mol, Moser and Pols, 2010).

The tension between commodification of collaboration and collaboration as productive considered as a basis for design and production, offers fertile ground to scholars, practitioners, and activists interested in co-designing practices of care for the common/s on different aspects. Possible directions may include:
The tension between commodification of collaboration and collaboration as productive in itself, considered as a basis for design and production, offers fertile ground to scholars, practitioners, and activists interested in co-designing practices of care for the common/s on different aspects.

What can I contribute?
What role might co-design play in establishing new and different commons-based forms of economic activities and systems?
• Theoretical relations between co-design and commons-based peer production
• Empirical cases of co-design in the context of commons-based peer production
How does the collaborative character of co-design interrelate with the commodification of digital social relations?
• Critical analysis of co-design in the context of platform capitalism
• Co-design and commons-based peer production as forms of activism
How might co-design be interrogated, redefined, and evaluated as a means to encourage care and social collaboration?
• Theoretical elaboration of criteria for evaluation of co-design activities promoting social collaboration
• Empirical discussions of evaluation of co-design activities promoting social collaboration

Why contribute to Co-Design?
• Your article will be published in a widely read and cited journal which is part of the design society giving you exposure across all our members.
• Your research will be validated by a robust single-blind peer review process
• You can share you research using our open access options
• You can follow the impact of your research using My Authored Works

Dates for your diary
22nd December 2017: Submissions deadline for intentions to contribute
28th February 2018: Notification of relevance sent to authors
31st May 2018: submission of full papers
7th September 2018: post-review notification of accept / reject / revisions to authors
7th December 2018: Deadline for submission of revised papers
8th February 2019: Final selected papers to production
September 2019: Publication of the Special Issue
Instructions for authors
Potential contributors should send an intention to contribute (deadline 22nd December 2017) of 1000 – 1500 words that outlines the content of the paper and a concise summary of the article’s research contributions. This document should also make it clear how the authors’ intended submission relates to the overall scope and specific themes and issues of this special issue. The document should be sent by email to codesignsharingcaring@m-iti.org<mailto:codesignsharingcaring@m-iti.org> in pdf format.

The special issue editorial team will provide a short review of the intention to contribute and will notify authors whether their work is in scope of the special issue call (notifications by 28th February 2018). Submissions within scope and with a potentially strong research contribution will be invited to submit a full paper.
Submissions of full papers (for invited authors)
Those authors who proceed past the intention to contribute phase will be invited to submit a full paper (maximum 7000 words including tables, references, captions, footnotes and endnotes) that will be subjected to the normal double-blind peer review process of the CoDesign journal. Manuscripts should be prepared according to guidelines which can be found on the journal website (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/ncdn – link “Instructions for Authors”). The deadline for full paper submissions is 31st May 2018.

All full paper submissions should be made online at the CoDesign Manuscript Central site at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ncdn. Authors should select submission to Special Issue “Repositioning Co-Design in the age of platform capitalism: from sharing to caring” when uploading manuscripts.
New users will need to create an account. Instructions on how to do this can be found on the same website. All published articles will undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial guest editors screening and anonymous refereeing by independent expert referees.
Potential authors should contact the guest editors at codesignsharingcaring@m-iti.org<mailto:codesignsharingcaring@m-iti.org> with any questions about the Special Issue.
For further Information about CoDesign go to: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/ncdn

Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2014. Commun: Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle. La Decouverte.
Dijck, José van. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press.
Ehn, Pelle. 1989. Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Arbetslivscentrum.
———. 2008. ‘Participation in Design Things’. In Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008, 92–101. PDC ’08. Indianapolis, IN, USA: Indiana University. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1795234.1795248.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. 1 edition. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.
Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2007. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. 1 edition. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
Light, Ann, and Yoko Akama. 2014. ‘Structuring Future Social Relations: The Politics of Care in Participatory Practice’. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers – Volume 1, 151–160. PDC ’14. New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2661435.2661438.
Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols. 2015. Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Bielefeld: Transcript Publishers.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. John Wiley & Sons.
Teli, Maurizio, Angela Di Fiore, and Vincenzo D’Andrea. 2017. ‘Computing and the Common: A Case of Participatory Design with Think Tanks’. CoDesign 13 (2): 83–95. doi:10.1080/15710882.2017.1309439.
Editorial information
• Guest Editor: Gabriela Avram, University of Limerick
• Guest Editor: Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Queensland University of Technology
• Guest Editor: Stefano De Paoli, Abertay University
• Guest Editor: Ann Light, University of Sussex
• Guest Editor: Peter Lyle, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute
• Guest Editor: Maurizio Teli, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute

Call for Papers: “Research Synthesis” and “Big Data in Psychology”

I’m interested in how big data is developing within psychology:

1) For “Hotspots in Psychology 2019” (guest editors: Michael Bosnjak &
Timo Gnambs) we are looking für meta-analyses and systematic reviews
(including methodological studies) from all areas of psychology:
https://conferences.leibniz-psychology.org/documents/zfp_a000294.pdf

2) For “Big Data in Psychology: Methods and Applications” (guest
editors: Mike Cheung & Suzanne Jak) we are looking for applications of
how to use Big Data in psychological research as well as
methodological contributions on collecting and analyzing Big Data in
psychology:
https://conferences.leibniz-psychology.org/documents/zfp_a000295.pdf

These special issues will be accompanied by two international
conferences on »Big Data in Psychology« (June 7-9, 2018) and »Research
Synthesis« (June 10-12, 2018) in Trier (Germany) next year:
http://researchsynthesis2018.leibniz-psychology.org/
http://bigdata2018.leibniz-psychology.org

As of today, the following keynote speakers have confirmed their
participation for these events:
Frank Bosco (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Andreas Brandmaier (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Mike Cheung (National University of Singapore)
Katrijn van Deun (Tilburg University)
Daniel Lakens (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Michael Neale (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Fred Oswald (Rice University)
Wolfgang Viechtbauer (Maastricht University)

How can the social sciences keep up with socio-technical change?

At a recent symposium I saw Ben Williamson give an excellent lecture about the rapidly developing field of educational data science and how it is reshaping educational practice. Some of the material is summarised here for those interested. It was a really broad overview of these developments and the theoretical challenges we face in trying to make sense of them. However what his lecture left me pondering most was the practical challenge of keeping track of these developments. There is so much happening, at such a rapid pace, it becomes hard to see how the critical social sciences can keep up with these developments.

Someone like Ben is doing it successfully within one field but this demands specialisation in a way that sits in tension with theorisation and contextualisation. To put it bluntly: how does collaboration happen when most of your colleagues know much less about these developments than you do? How do you engage with important philosophical, ethical and political questions posed by these developments when you have to spend at least half an hour describing to an audience what is actually happening? How do you have conversations with those working in comparable fields, drawing out connections and identifying similarities and differences between what you are studying?

My point is not that it is impossible. Far from it. Or even that it is new, as it’s clearly a particular manifestation of the broader epistemic challenge of specialisation. Only that it is hard. Furthermore, it is this difficulty which compounds the specialisation dynamic because the people you inevitably find yourself working with face the same practical challenge in relation to the broader disciplinary community, increasing your epistemic reliance upon one another to develop your research in a collaborative way.

One obvious impediment to addressing this problem is the journal system. If it takes six months to write a journal article, another year to get it published and another two years before responses to what you’re written begin to appear (if indeed they ever do) then subsequent developments might well have rendered what you’ve written partially redundant. Factor in the bias towards length within journals that publish critical social science, as well as the low status accorded to descriptive or review pieces, to discover a publication infrastructure that systematically undermines our capacity to cope with the pace of socio-technical change. The fact it’s one most, if not all, find themselves bound into through the logic of career development entrenches the problem only further.

It won’t surprise anyone that I think research blogging can be a partial solution to this problem. It can accelerate scholarly dialogue in a way that mitigates, without overcoming, the decelerative effects of the journal system. So too could more attention to information-searching and information-storage practices within the critical social sciences. But perhaps we need to think more broadly than this. My developing conviction is that we need to create systems for networked horizon scanning in a way that complement, rather than seek to replace, the existing journal system:

Horizon scanning is a technique for detecting early signs of potentially important developments through a systematic examination of potential threats and opportunities, with emphasis on new technology and its effects on the issue at hand. The method calls for determining what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes. It explores novel and unexpected issues as well as persistent problems and trends, including matters at the margins of current thinking that challenge past assumptions.

Horizon scanning is often based on desk research, helping to develop the big picture behind the issues to be examined. Desk research involves a wide variety of sources, such as the Internet, government ministries and agencies, non-governmental organisations, international organisations and companies, research communities, and on-line and off-line databases and journals. Horizon scanning can also be undertaken by small groups of experts who are at the forefront in the area of concern: They share their perspectives and knowledge with each other so as to ‘scan’ how new phenomena might influence the future.

A solid ‘scan of the horizon’ can provide the background to develop strategies for anticipating future developments and thereby gain lead time. It can also be a way to assess trends to feed into a scenario development process.

https://www.oecd.org/site/schoolingfortomorrowknowledgebase/futuresthinking/overviewofmethodologies.htm

It’s important to recognise that these changes aren’t simply a matter of technical developments. There are a vast array of actors with a vested interest in pursuing these developments, encompassing policy makers, think tanks, foundations, entrepreneurs, data scientists and corporations. They proceed through a dizzying array of projects, intervening in every facet of each sector of social life. Such actors enjoy an obvious epistemic priority over those who seek to (critically) study them, inhabiting a rich web of assumptions, meanings and relations which those from the outside must come to inhabit while retaining distance. They also enjoy a temporal privilege, working in collectives towards these ends, creating a challenge for those who seek to track and analyse their endeavors either individually or within small teams, often while juggling a whole array of other demands.

The challenges we face in researching such developments are continuing to grow while we remain locked into individualising and decelerative modes of working that are wholly inadequate to them.

Public engagement, social media and university boundaries

In her wonderful Lower Ed, Tressie Cottom describes how her public profile led to her being in contact with someone who was enormously relevant to her ongoing research. From pg 103:

Aaron found me through my public writing and blogging and social media and decided that speaking to me might be interesting. He emailed me and kept emailing me over the course of a year. Eventually, I was giving a lecture in the same state where he lived, and he invited me to have coffee.

One of the most fascinating conversations I ever had while doing asexuality research was with a woman in her 80s who found out about me through an interview in a newspaper. She was unwillingly to be formally interviewed but an extensive phone conversation was enormously useful to my attempts to understand the changing social conditions in which being asexual is rendered problematic or otherwise. In both cases, we can see visibility facilitating people coming to us, creating opportunities if we are open to them but also complicating habitual expectations about how we manage relationships with groups external to the academy.

I’d love to hear other people’s experiences of such encounters. It strikes me that this is an advantage to public engagement which is rarely recognised. I suspect it’s a relatively common experience amongst people who engage in a lot of this activity and it’s one we should recognise and explore in a systematic way. The focus of a lot of what I’m doing over the next few months will be university boundaries and how they’re being changed by new technology. The role of public engagement in narrowing the gap between researchers and the researched is an important aspect of this. But there’s a theoretical complexity to how we conceptualise these boundaries which engaging with the work of Jana Bacevic has left me newly aware of.

Recognising such a benefit is interesting if we frame public engagement in terms of academic labour. It’s often cast as another thing to do, adding additional items to already over long to do lists. This implicitly conceives of it as something extrinsic to the research process, as if everything else about the professional practice of those involved remains fixed, only to be supplemented by these additional activities. But in reality public engagement is something relational, both in terms of the working patterns of the engaged and their relationship to the wider community of their research and ‘wider society’. It changes both in a way which complicates the initial comparison one made in which a working life without public engagement is compared to one which includes such activity.

My discussion so far has been about public engagement in general rather than social media in particular. However the opportunities and problems of the former are increasingly being forced as an issue by the widespread adoption of the latter. The boundary between the researcher and wider society is being changed by the uptake of new communications technology, making it more likely that the people we research and write about will talk back to us about what we say. Embracing this relationality can bring great benefits to the research process, with the the potential for important new connections being just one example of this. But there are liable to problems created if we ignore it. My suggestion is that what at present seem like outliers (people who are extremely visible through public engagement activity) represent the future normal, one which researchers will urgently need to adapt themselves too.

The ‘Sharing Economy’ as Disembedding Mechanism

As some reading this may be aware, I’m fairly critical of the account Giddens gives of late modernity, seeing it as a wrong-turning for many qualitative researchers who sought to situate their findings in a socio-historical context. Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of the disembedding mechanism and how it might allow us to theorising the ‘sharing economy’. This is how Rob Stones summarises the concept in the abstract for an encyclopaedia entry:

Disembedding refers to the way in which contemporary social practices can no longer be primarily defined by their grounding, or embeddedness, in the local context of a restricted place and time. Social practices are now, in large part, removed from the immediacies of context, with the relations they involve typically being stretched over large tracts of time and space. Local experiences and events are shaped by processes taking place on the other side of the world, and vice versa. These are processes, moreover, that are primarily impersonal and abstract.

What Giddens describes as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts and their rearticulation across indefinite tracts of time-space” give rise to a “tremendous acceleration in time-space distanciation” which he sees as characterising modernity. He identifies two types of disembedding mechanism, symbolic tokens and expert systems. The former are mediums of exchange which have a standard value across contexts, thus disembedding valuation from a local context and fixing it in terms of much broader processes, as well as disembedding obligation from temporal unfolding within that context by facilitating credit. The latter are forms of expert knowledge and technical capacity which have validity independently of those who make use of them, leaving situated interaction shaped by processes of knowledge production and specialisation far away from it.

It strikes me that the ‘sharing economy’ represents a new form of disembedding mechanism. The business model here seems reasonably clear: find a social interaction which already is or could be monetised, develop a digital platform which can be inserted as an intermediary within that interaction and rely on network dynamics to scale the new model in a way that will ultimately squeeze out any instances of the interaction which are unmediated or reliant on an older form of mediation e.g. local taxi dispatchers. With the growth of the ‘sharing economy’, larger tracts of human interaction are governed by the technical architecture and social imperative of large corporations based many thousands of mile away, whose local operations are concerned at most with recruiting new workers & safeguarding the platform against regulatory pushback.

It’s useful to consider the ‘sharing economy’ in these terms because it takes us away from a fixation on technological possibility. Certainly, we could not have had Uber and Airbnb without a particular configuration of mobile computing, cloud computing and ubiquitous social networking. But we also need to consider why these platforms are capable of scaling in the way they do. Part of the issue is undoubtedly about coordination, with a technical capacity to identify resources and make them accessible in an unprecedentedly precise way. However the more interesting issue concerns trust, or rather its decline in late modernity. Trust in the platform becomes plausible when trust in each other begins to break down. What will the political consequences be of the radicalisation of disembedding which the sharing economy represents & the new orientation towards trust which participation in it begins to engender?

The centralisation of the web and the constraints on academic speech

A great essay by Ethan Zuckerman, which raises the crucial question of infrastructural dependency within the digital university. We can overcome this partly through cultural change (e.g. the importance of a domain of one’s own and boycotting companies like academia.edu) but there are institutional factors limiting the potential reach of these strategies. To what extent is mandated engagement expected to proceed through these channels? How do procurement and provision decisions made at an institutional level lock scholars into these systems?

Early proponents of the power of digital publishing celebrated the ways in which the Internet, and in particular the world wide web, democratized both access to information and the ability to disseminate knowledge to wide audiences. News organizations might evade government controls of the press by publishing on servers outside their nations’ borders. Dissidents could organize in the digital public sphere, evading controls that prevented freedom of assembly in the physical world. Scholars could disseminate work in progress directly to the web either outside of the process of peer review or under the aegis of new types of online journals.

It’s possible this utopian vision reigned for at least the early years of the consumer web, when independent online publishing was common. It’s also arguable that this has always been a fantasy, and that chokepoints like the domain name system and large internet service providers have always had the power to control speech. But since 2010, publishing online has centralized on a few commercial platforms, notably Amazon Web Services (which provides hosting and backend for over a million different websites, including those for publishers like Netflix, Instagram, and GitHub ); Facebook, which hosts content produced by over 1.7 billion people; Google, whose YouTube service hosts a significant portion of the web’s video content; as well as smaller players like WordPress and Wikimedia.

These platforms have immense power over what speech is possible, and their decisions are opaque and not subject to external review. When Facebook decided to prohibit Nick Ut’s Pulitzer-winning photo of Kim Phúc running from a napalm attack, public shaming was the only option Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten found for appealing the decision. Publishing platforms face intense pressure from governments to block controversial content, from Israeli government pressure to remove critical content from Facebook to the “blockade” against Wikileaks that caused the leaks organization to lose web hosting, domain name services, and services to accept donations.¹Examples abound of Google’s power to discriminate through indexing of information, and the results merit close study.Far more subtle forms of content control happen every day, from organized campaigns to “flag” and demand removal of content a group of coordinated individuals find offensive,² from Buddhist Burmese flagging pro-Rohingya content to Palestinian and Israeli activists attempting to silence each other.

http://parameters.ssrc.org/2017/02/imagining-decentralized-publication-and-curation/

There are many ways to publish without these centralised systems but we remain dependent upon them for discovery. Unfortunately, as he puts it, “the ability to publish without the ability to be discovered is an empty promise” and “In a world of scarce attention, those who control curation and discovery systems control what we encounter and what we know.” This is bringing about a radical transformation of the knowledge system:

As we consider the transformations in the production, publication, and archiving of social research under digital conditions, it is essential that we understand that scholarly publishing and discovery, a space traditionally controlled by university presses and scholarly peers, is now centralizing around a small number of technically sophisticated commercial firms. The good news in this development is that we have the opportunity to make collective cause with those seeking to ensure online publishing and discovery systems are transparent, fair, auditable, and distributed. The bad news is that we find ourselves joining a profoundly uphill battle, where many of our goals are merely infeasible and others may be technically impossible.

http://parameters.ssrc.org/2017/02/imagining-decentralized-publication-and-curation/