Category: show in team updates

Welcome Umberto Boschi & Joris van Hoboken

This week we have Umberto Boschi joining the team for a couple of months as a research intern: Umberto Boschi is currently enrolled in New Media and Digital Culture at the Utrecht University as a MA student. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Pisa. His research interests vary from Blockchain technologies to the imaginary of Open Data.

Moreover, Joris van Hoboken is the newest member of the ethics board, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam. Short bio: his research addresses law and policy in the field of digital media, electronic communications and the internet, with a focus on the fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of expression and transatlantic relations. Current research includes an investigation of privacy in smartphone ecosystems, together with MIT, as well as work on the right to be forgotten and encryption policy. He is a specialist in data privacy, government surveillance through cloud computing and the regulation of internet intermediaries and algorithmic governance.

Welcome to DATACTIVE!

On Digital Unrest, Lonneke at The Night of Philosophy

On the 21st of April Lonneke participated in the ‘Nacht van de Filosofie’ (The Night of Philosophy) in Nijmegen, in a panel about ‘Digital Unrest’. The panel was about Big Data, perceptions of Big Data, and the possible implications of Big Data for privacy and politics. She talked about data activism, and how activists have different ways of responding to Big Data challenges. The other panelists were Patricia de Vries (media critic and researcher writing about algorithmic epistemology), Marjolijn Lanzing (a privacy researcher in the context of Big Data and self-tracking ) and the panel was moderated by Joyce Pijnenburg (philosopher and member of SWIP). SWIP is the Society for Women in Philosophy in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Lonneke van der Velden at the Night of the Philosophy

Friday the 21st of April, Lonneke van der Velden gave a talk at the Radboud University in a ‘conversation with philosophers’. Find the program here (in Dutch)

Can we think of a radical turn in thinking about the self and our relationships in a time of social media? And what about the use of Big Data and our Privacy? Join the panel discussion and reflect on what philosopher Byung Chul-Han describes as ‘the digital era, an era without reason’.

 

 

Stefania at the “Tracking Experience” research seminar, University of Copenhagen

DATACTIVE PI Stefania Milan will speak at the Research Seminar “Tracking Experience – Enhancing Lives?”, organized by Stine Lomborg at the Center for Communication and Computing, University of Copenhagen, on April 24-25. She will  deliver a talk on “Questioning and subverting the tracking of experience: Distributed agency and alternative epistemologies from the ground up”, bringing in a critical perspective on self-tracking seen in relation to political agency. Other speakers include Dorthe Brogård Kristensen (University of Southern Denmark), Minna Ruckenstein (University of Helsinki), Katarzyna Wac (University of Copenhagen) and Rob Procter (University of Warwick), Jan Ekstrom (IBM), and the organizer Stine Lomborg. Check out the program of the research seminar here.

Kersti Wissenbach on ‘civic tech as activism’ @Protest Media Ecologies

The 20th and 21st of April, Kersti will attend the Protest Media Ecologies: Communicative Affordances for Social Change in the Digital Era in Florence, Italy. She will give a presentation titled “Civic tech as activism: The role of transnational communities for data-driven governance”:

New modes of engagement with data and technology have emerged over the last half-decade, which go under the label of ‘civic technology’ (or ‘civic tech’). Individuals and groups take advantage of the availability of data and related software to directly engage and intervene in governance processes. An example is the community around the freedom of information request tool Alaveteli, which supports citizens willing to exert power over under-performing institutions in currently twenty-five countries.

At its core stands the potential of technologies and data at civil society’s disposal to better execute their civic role within the democratic realm. However, the civic tech scene spans from activist groups to international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and the business start-up scene. Civic tech activism is characterised by the collective building, utilization, and localization of tools to enable direct and inclusive citizen engagement in the most diverse socio-political contexts. A community expanding through such collective engagement enables context-relevant tactics catering for local communication means and cultures that enable civic-driven calls for government accountability. This is particularly relevant in less democratic countries.

This presentation will discuss how the action repertoires and collective identity dynamics of civic tech activism can create significant different power dynamics for opening up civil society space than other actors utilizing data and technology for governance processes. It will compare the potentials of civic tech activism with INGOs using technology for short-term interventions and tech start-ups selling open data platform software to governments that might or might not use those platforms to share politically relevant information with their citizens.

 

About ‘Protest Media Ecologies’

Our investigation focused on activists media practices in the framework of anti­austerity movements
in three Southern European countries ­ Greece, Italy and Spain. With this workshop we aim at sharing the knowledge produced through our research with other scholars that focus on topics related to the use of media in the context of mobilizations. We want to engage with the research of people working in the same field, to learn about your projects and findings, and together create research synergies that will deepen our understanding and theoretical considerations of protest media ecologies in Europe and beyond.

This two­day workshop is organized in the framework of the research project Protest Media Ecologies: Communicative Affordances for Social Change in the Digital Era at Lakehead University (Canada) and Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant.

Becky @SensorPublics on Calculating & Countering Surveillance Risks

 

5-7 April, 2017
Becky has presented at the ‘Sensor Publics: a Workshop on the Politics of Sensing and Data Infrastructures‘ organized by Laurie Waller and Nina Witjes, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University Munich. An abstract of her presentation ‘Calculating & Countering Surveillance Risks in an Environment of Ubiquitous Sensors‘ can be read below.

 

SensorPublics

From the geopolitics of remote sensing satellites, to the political-economy of urban sensor networks, the domestic economy of home sensing devices or the democratic promise of participatory citizen-sensing, we are interested in how sensing and data infrastructures become publicly controversial and invested with political and moral capacities. How do sensor publics unsettle relations between political actors and their environments? In what ways do they problematise the governance of big data or the regulation of real-time surveillance? And, can sensor publics provide occasions for democratizing relations between politicians, experts, activists and citizens?

Calculating & Countering Surveillance Risks in an Environment of Ubiquitous Sensors.

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 ‘digital threat’ over another; to apply risk management strategies to determine the appropriate course of action under fearful circumstances; and to own responsibility for the impacts of any ensuing threats. The extent of this responsibility leads civil society actors to call upon the assistance of security experts, who harden the information infrastructures of civil society organisations, develop security-centric software such as encrypted message and email programs, and push for the standardisation of risk management processes such as threat modeling and adversarial analysis. This push for risk standardization presents an interesting moment of translation among different ‘communities of security practice’. It comes at a time in which ubiquitous sensor networks present new risks and threats to civil society actors. Current security resources aimed at civil society actors are only beginning to address, for example, how activists can safely protest when their every move is tracked across devices and physical spaces with technologies such as advanced facial recognition and mobile phone surveillance. What are the frameworks and practices that civil society and technical communities turn to in order to calculate and counter these new risks and threats of surveillance? This conference paper draws upon my doctoral research, which is done through participant observation, document analysis, and extensive semi-structured interviewing, crossing national boundaries in order to trace the interactions of different communities of practice. In order to conceptualize the interactions between non- security focused communities and security experts, the study draws upon Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker’s work on communities of practice in relation to boundary infrastructures and boundary objects. The study bridges science and technology studies approaches to the study of information infrastructures with the work of critical data and critical security scholars such as Louise Amoore and Claudia Aradau, in order to conceptualize how risk epistemologies are produced and circulated throughout different communities of security practice. The paper presentation draws upon one year of desk research and three months of field work.

Jeroen de Vos at Internet of Things day Rotterdam

Jeroen de Vos will be conducting a workshop at the Internet of Things day in Rotterdam, organized by the university of applied sciences of Rotterdam. In light of the international IoT day. This two-day event is built around the question ‘Wishful world, Wishful thinking?’, and Jeroen will present on day two in the inclusive society block.

Tickets are free but need registration: iotrotterdam.nl/aanmelden

Workshop #3 (ENG) | Exploring Radical Inclusiveness

The theme ‘inclusive society’ may evoke a notion of an ideal and democratized social space. However, following the revelations on large scale data-scraping and sociodemographic profiling used by the police force, political parties and commercial parties alike, I would like to expand the notion to ‘radical inclusiveness’. In a world where we are datafied on both a conscious and subconscious level, to what extent is the act of ‘inclusion’ in data gathering practices voluntary and conscious? This workshop will provide some of the tools to shed some light on your own digital sediments, to help shaping the contours of your data shadow. Through the ‘shadow body’ and the ‘filter bubble’, we draw on a set of specific internet tools to look at ourselves through the eyes of Google, question our own filter bubble, and track those who track us.

Davide Beraldo @ SPUI25

what: ‘The Paradox of Social Movements’

where: Spui 25, Amsterdam

when: april 6th, 17.00 – 18.00

Davide Beraldo will give a talk at SPUI25, April 6 at 5h, as part of the series ‘Cheers to Science’. The lecture, ‘The Paradox of Social Movements’, will cover the topics of his PhD thesis. It will present the empirical findings of a digital exploration of Anonymous, showing its contradictory composition and the role of ‘ontological paradoxes’ in the self-reproduction of this ‘contentious brand’. The talk will be followed by drinks.

For more information and to register: http://www.spui25.nl/programma/item/the-paradox-of-social-movements.html

 

 

Lonneke van der Velden at the DataPublics workshop

 

Under the header ‘governing publics’, Lonneke van der Velden presented her work at the DataPublics conference April 1st. For more detail on the outline and schedule of the event, see their website.

The presentation can be watched online!

 

The materiality of surveillance publics

This presentation discusses the materiality of surveillance publics. Notions of material publics are particularly useful to think about activist interventions into surveillance. Digital surveillance is considered to be a rather intangible phenomenon. However, now and then, surveillance gets ‘exposed’, for example through leaks that disclose surveillance technologies or by using software that can detect online tracking. These interventions (sometimes dubbed ‘countersurveillance’ or ‘sousveillance’) manage to transform digital surveillance practices into public knowledge repositories that can be studied and, in some cases, this results into new online investigative tools. In the presentation I demonstrate how surveillance can become ‘public matter’: in the process of turning surveillance into a matter of concern, surveillance becomes itself ‘datafied’, and this material can be used for public ends. In other words, they give rise to ‘data publics’. Moreover, these interventions assemble very specific data publics: these publics are situated in socio-technical environments in which intelligence, secrecy, and privacy practices codetermine the modes of working, and thus, interestingly, making things private coincides with ways of making things public.

 

DataPublics will investigate the diverse ways in which publics are, and can be, constituted, provoked, threatened, understood, and represented. This includes examining the role played in the formation of publics by new on- and offline infrastructures, data visualisations, social and economic practices, research methods and creative practices, and emerging and future technologies. Specifically, the event will facilitate cross-cutting conversations between designers, social scientists and creative technologists to explore the new challenges and opportunities afforded by thinking and working with “Data Publics”.

DATACTIVE at RightsCon

DATACTIVE co-organizes, jointly with Vidushi Marda of the Centre for Internet & Society (Bangalore, India), a session on fake news and regulation at RightsCon titled “Resisting content regulation in the post-truth world: How to fix fake news and the algorithmic curation of social media?”. RightsCon will take place March 29-31 2017 in Brussels.

In addition, three DATACTIVE team members (Stefania, Becky, Davide and Guillen) will be in attendance for fieldwork purposes.

See the draft program of RightsCon here.

RightsCon is the world’s leading event on the future of the internet. Convening civil society leaders, business visionaries, government representatives, activists, legal experts, technologists, and more from across the globe. This year, RightsCon Brussels will include three full days of programming to tackle some of today’s most challenging issues. With over 200 sessions and more than 1,000 participants anticipated, RightsCon 2017 will provide unparalleled opportunities to engage with community leaders in sessions, private meetings and discussions, satellite events, parties, movie screenings, and social events.