Sorry for x-posting!
Please consider submitting a paper to our session E07 until midnight CET on February 14th,
2018.
https://nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6257
Happy holidays!
Katja, Guillén, Stefania
After Data Activism: reactions to civil society's engagement with data
Convenors
* Guillén Torres (University of Amsterdam)
* Katja Mayer (Technical University Munich)
* Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam)
Short abstract
This panel focuses on data practices that hinder rather than foster civil society's
political engagement. We invite you to discuss how data governance, data science and
social technologies are co-producing asymmetries of power.
Long abstract
By foregrounding the constitutive power of information to shape social reality (Braman,
2006), recent approaches to datafication have highlighted data's active role in
configuring new ways of engaging politically with -while dissolving the barriers between-
public policy, economy, science, nature and culture (Milan & van der Velden, 2016).
Thus, the term data activism has been used to study practices in which data plays a
crucial role in shaping civil society's agenda, in particular when taking action
against governmental or corporate practices of injustice or misinformation. Today, various
actors embrace the "data as new oil" metaphor and we even witness multiple forms
of "open-washing" of politics and economies (e.g. transparency). Other actors
however, have lately shown reluctance to support civic engagement with data, implementing
strategies of information control at different scales: from the enactment of
government-wide policies that make difficult access to data, to recurrent denials of
information requests, passing by the wilful production of the opaqueness of Automated
Decision Making or scoring systems.
This panel focuses on how certain actors are taking advantage of information's
capacity to shape social reality, with a special focus on data practices that resist
rather than foster citizens' political engagement. We invite you to discuss how
mechanisms of information control produce and sustain asymmetries of power, often in
complicity with data science and social technologies. We further welcome contributions
focused on experiences with data activism through the mobilisation of open data and public
sector information, or dealing with the political aftermath of data-driven projects.
Dr. Katja Mayer
Post-doctoral research fellow
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Computational Social Science and Big Data
Bavarian School of Public Policy
Technical University of Munich
Richard-Wagner-Str. 1
80333 Munich GERMANY
http://www.katjamayer.net/
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Newly published:
Current Challenges in Patent Information Retrieval 2nd ed. (M. Lupu, K. Mayer, N.Kando, A.
Trippe)
Springer Information Retrieval Series