Category: show in team updates

Guillén at The Expert Session on Human Rights Defenders

Author: Guillén Torres

On Monday 9th of October, I was very happy to participate in the Expert Session on Human Rights Defenders, organized by Justice and Peace Netherlands. The goal of the event was to reflect upon the role that Data (Big and Small) can play in the defense of Human Rights around the world.

The workshop was also a platform for the presentation of the Index of Human Rights Defenders, developed jointly by Justice and Peace and the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. This new index aims to facilitate the identification of tangible actions that are needed to improve precarious situations for human rights defenders worldwide.

My intervention was centered on strategies to turn (Big) Data into policy recommendations, which is one of the interests of the DATACTIVE project. Since there is currently no general agreement on a specific methodology to achieve this goal, I decided to prepare an exploratory talk to share recent findings in academic research on the topics of evidence-informed public policy and Big Data. In addition, I proposed the participants to colonize the field of Business Analytics, which has been very productive in developing various frameworks for the production of Actionable Insights out of Big Data but focuses almost exclusively on the creation of economic value.

I was lucky enough to present next to Hisham Almirat, a research associate at Datactive, and Hyeong-sik Yoo, from HURIDOCS, who shared with the participants of the workshop thoughts and techniques on ethical data collection.

Miren Gutiérrez will be our in-house visiting scholar in October and November

Miren Gutierrez will be in Amsterdam on October 3-14 and November 6-18. She hopes to engage with the Datactive team in exploring new research venues and opportunities, and to participate in the events, conferences and activities in which the team is involved.

About Miren
Miren is a Research Associate at Datactive. She is also a professor of Communication, director of the postgraduate programme “Data analysis, research and communication”, and member of the research team of the Communication Department at the University of Deusto, Spain. Miren’s main interest is proactive data activism, or how the data infrastructure can be utilized for social change in areas such as development, climate change and the environment. She is a Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute of London, where she leads and participates in data-based projects exploring the intersection between biodiversity loss, environmental crime and development.

She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences. Her dissertation “Bit and Atoms: Proactive data activism and social change from a critical theory perspective” explores the relationship between people, data and technologies.

Kersti on political participation and data activism in a sub-Sahara African context (Bonn)

VHS Bonn (VolksHochSchule), Adult Education Centre
Monday, September 25, 2017, 18: 00-19: 30

Kersti Wissenbach will give a public lecture about political participation and data activism in a sub-Sahara African context. The talk is part of the ‘Afrikanische Aspekte’ lecture series, organizing every semester by the German African Center together with the adult education center with the aim to open up these issues to a wider audience. Other speakers this year are from the German Development Bank, The German Institute for Development (DIE), Uni Bonn, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Germanwatch e. V.

On the talk

New technological developments offer more and more opportunities for citizen participation. New civil society actors, such as Civic Tech, and Open Data activists are taking advantage of this opportunity. They demand greater transparency from governments, public authorities to take responsibility, and open doors for direct political participation.

But what does involvement of the citizens in the digital age really look like when the power dynamics and socio-political contexts determine which data are collected and used for political decision-making? How can new technologies and new actors positively influence such dynamics and relationships in the African context?

Find more information on the talk here (in German).

Guillén at the WTMC Summer School

This year, the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture summer school focused on Ethnography, Digital Objects, and STS, under the guidance of Christine Hine. The yearly event takes place in the quiet former convent of Soeterbeeck, in Ravenstein, which is now a conference center of the Radboud Universiteit.

The goal of the Summer School was to reflect around how can researchers produce knowledge from digital objects, and what challenges does ‘The Digital’ imply for the methods of Social Sciences. The event consisted of a series of lectures by Christine Hine, who has developed extensive work on digital ethnography, and other STS scholars: Vlad Niculescu (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Nishant Shah (ArtEZ School of the Arts), Justus Uitermark (University of Amsterdam), Karin Wenz (Maastricht University), and Sally Wyatt (Maastricht University / Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences).

In addition to that, some of the attendees presented their own PhD research spanning a wide array of subjects, from period tracking apps, to mobility experiments, passing by digital patient records and The People’s Internet. I presented my work on Digital Shatter Zones: digital spaces in which public sector information and open data is made available without necessarily being accessible. You can see the slides here.

 

DATACTIVE at the ECPR conference, Oslo

Davide, Kersti and Stefania are attending the annual conference of the European Consortium for Political Research in Oslo (September 6-9), reconnecting with their political and social science souls.

The three of them will take part in the panel exploring “the next stage of digital activism. Reviewing Practices and Concepts in the Era of Datafication”, organized by Stefania. Davide will present an excerpt of his PhD thesis, entitled “Contentious Branding. Occupy and Anonymous between the Connective and Collective”. Kersti will present two papers, “Governance from the Grassroots: Digital Activism for Government Accountability” and “Accounting for Power in the Big Data Era: The Meaning of Collectivity in Datafied Societies”. Stefania, too, will present two papers, a snapshot from her work “Towards a Socio-Technical Theory of Political Agency in Datafied Societies” and “Political Agency, Digital Traces and Bottom-up Data Practices”, soon to appear in the International Journal of Communication.

Becky at 4S conference in Boston

Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), 2017
Boston, Massachusetts, August 30 – September 2, 2017

 

STS (In)Sensibilities

If sensibility is the ability to grasp and to respond, how might we articulate the (in)sensibilities of contemporary technoscience? How, similarly, can we reflect on the extent and limits of our own sensibilities as STS scholars, teachers, and activists? The conference theme invites an open reading and exploration of how the world is made differently sense-able through multiple discourses and practices of knowledge-making, as well as that which evades the sensoria of technoscience and STS. Our aim is that the sense of ‘sense’ be read broadly, from mediating technologies of perception and apprehension to the discursive and material practices that render worlds familiar and strange, real and imagined, actual and possible, politically (in)sensitive and ethically sensible. Find the detailed program here.

 

Becky presents ‘Calculating & Countering Surveillance Risks: Translations in Practice’

With the proliferation of digital surveillance, how to act under the presumption of monitoring and tracking has become a central subject of concern to civil society. The responsibility of the ‘surveillance subject’ extends to the ability to anticipate the likelihood of one kind of security threat over another; to apply risk management strategies to determine the appropriate course of action in fearful and uncertain circumstances; and to own responsibility for the impacts of any ensuing threats. With the risks of emerging phenomena like the ‘internet of things’, ‘smart cities’, intelligent autonomous systems, and preemptive security, the responsibilities placed on chronically under-resourced civil society actors are greater than ever. This paper investigates the practices civil society actors and affiliated technical communities turn to in order to calculate and counter these emerging risks, using translations and boundary objects as an analytical lens to understand security in practice.

The paper draws upon my doctoral research, which bridges surveillance studies and STS approaches to the study of risk, security, and information infrastructures, including the work of Michel Callon and John Law (2005) on calculative practices and Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star on ‘boundary objects’ and ‘boundary infrastructures’(1989; 1999), with the work of critical data and critical security scholars such as Louise Amoore and Claudia Aradau.

The research is done through participant observation, document analysis, and extensive semi-structured interviewing, crossing national boundaries in order to trace transnational interactions. The paper draws upon document analysis of different risk and threat modeling frameworks, and data from interviews conducted with privacy engineers, human rights defenders, activists, and security industry professionals.

 

About 4S

The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is an international, nonprofit scholarly society founded in 1975. 4S fosters interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine (a field often referred to as STS). Membership in the society is open to anyone interested in understanding developments in science, technology, or medicine in relation to their social contexts.

‘Big Data y la Imaginación Sociológica’ in Bogotá, Colombia

On August 8, 2017, Stefania will give a talk at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, with the title ‘Big Data y la Imaginación Sociológica. Estudio de datos, activismo de datos y periodismo de datos. Su importancia para los estudios en comunicación”. The event will take place at the Auditorio, Centro Ático, at 9am.

DATACTIVE at SHA2017

Many of the DATACTIVE people are attending SHA [Still Hacking Anyway], taking place from the 4th until the 8th of August in Zeewolde (NL). You can often find us hanging out around at the Technopolitics village.

About SHA 2017

SHA2017 is an international non-profit outdoor hacker camp/conference taking place in The Netherlands in 2017 on August 4th to 8th. It is the successor of a string of similar events happening every four years: GHP, HEU, HIP, HAL, WTH, HAR and OHM. Similar events are EMF 2016 in the UK, CCC Camp in Germany.

The camp is organized for and by volunteers from and around all facets of the international hacker community. Knowledge sharing, technological advancement, experimentation, connecting with your hacker peers and of course hacking are some of the core values of this event.

DATACTIVE at the DMI Summer School 17 on the accessibility of open data portals

From the 3rd until the 7th of July, Guillen, Umberto, and Jeroen of the DATACTIVE team participated in the Digital Methods Initiative Summer School 2017. They conducted a one-week research around the question as to how to assess accessibility of government-facilitated open data portals. Just a glimpse of the final report (to be published soon on the DMI wiki):

“Open Data Portals are one of the main ways in which data users and data providers interact. The goal of this project was to identify mechanisms to assess the accessibility of Data Portals using Digital Methods. The project was particularly focused on tracing alternative voices to the ubiquitous celebration of Open Data, for two reasons: on the one hand, searching for contestation by both users and developers was considered as a good starting point to locate the shortcomings of Data Portals, and on the other, we were interested in identifying what elements of the critical discourse about the Open Data phenomenon (such as that built by Jo Bates) could be specifically connected to Data Portals.”

For more information, please find the presentation on the topic.

Lonneke contributing to the Tertium project in the Volkskrant

On the 17th of June Lonneke contributed to the ‘Oplossers’ (‘solutioners’) series in the Volkskrant which is a Dutch journalistic project by Tertium in which scientistst are asked to reflect upon contemporary societal issues. The question was about ways for democratising the internet. In her piece, she suggested several interventions around alternative data infrastructures.