On the 27th of January Lonneke participated in a philosophy conference about contemporary resistance. Her panel focused on the question ‘How can we resist?’ and she discussed how the integration of encryption belongs in a larger arsenal of resistance strategies.
The 30th of November we had the honour to share our lunch with Nathalie Maréchal, Senior Research Fellow at Ranking Digital Rights. In her talk she discussed the Ranking Digital Rights project, a non-profit research initiative housed at New America’s Open Technology Institute, working with an international network of partners to set global standards for how companies in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector should respect freedom of expression and privacy.
More in specific, she eleborated on the findings of the 2015 Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index. This research evaluates 16 of the world’s most powerful Internet and telecommunications companies on their public commitments and disclosed policies affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. She also discussed her own dissertation project “Defying Censorship, Evading Surveillance: The Political Economy of Circumvention Technology,” and her plans for 2017.
Short bio
Nathalie is Senior Research Fellow at Ranking Digital Rights, a project housed at New America’s Open Technology Institute. She first joined RDR as a COMPASS Fellow in Summer 2014 and was Senior Fellow in Information Controls from February to September 2016. During this time, Nathalie spearheaded RDR’s work on expanding RDR’s Corporate Accountability Index to include software & device companies in the 2017 Index. In her current position as Senior Research Fellow, Nathalie conducts research on topics related to internet policy, business and human rights, and continues to contribute to RDR’s global engagement and outreach efforts.
Between October and December Kersti stayed as a guest research fellow with the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy. She used the time at COSMOS to investigate ways forward to strengthen the relationship between Communication for Development and Social Movement research. Next to her focus on the intersection of communication and social movement studies she also visited various courses. Among others, she explored the potential of contemporary work on the intersection of democracy and social movements to inform her work on the open governance movement and civic tech activism in particular.
Kersti will return to Florence in Spring for her research and as a speaker in the workshop “Protest Media Ecologies: Communicative Affordances for Social Change in the Digital Era”.
Both Stefania Milan and Lonneke van der Velden participated in a panel session at the Subversion of Big Data – Cultures, Discourses and Practices of Big Data in Social Movements Contexts. This seminar is part of the Social Movements and Media Technologies: Present Challenges and Future Developments Seminar Series which took place in Florance at the 17th and 18th of November 2016.
The panels being, respectively:
For a long time now activists have managed different types of social data for
civic purposes in the context of their mobilizations. In doing this, they devel-
oped different attitudes and beliefs towards data, including what citizens can
do with them and to what extent they can be embedded into social movement
activities. This panel looks at big data through the lenses of different activists’
data cultures in order to put the emergence of big data, and their integration
within activists’ repertoires of contention, into an historical and cultural per-
spective.
2. Social practices related to big data in activists’ contexts
Activists are not just passive producers of data when they mobilize. On the
contrary, they often consciously engage in social practices that include the
gathering, analyzing, and visualizing of big data in the context of their activist
projects. This panel discusses such social practices related to the use of big
data in the broad framework of social movements. The aim is to unveil the lib-
eration potential of big data for citizens and their grassroots initiatives as well
as the repressive capacities of big data when it comes to activists and their
(revolutionary) projects.
The entire program can be found here.
Over the last couple of months, there has been a steady flow of changes in the team composition.
First of all, our dearest Mahsa Alimardani has left for Canada. Her research assistant position has now been filled by Jeroen de Vos, who is taking care of the practical operations at the backend of DATACTIVE. Secondly, Frederike Kaltheuner is joining Privacy International in London, she will stay connected as research associate. Moreover, we are warmheartedly welcoming our two new associates: Hisham Almiraat, the founder of the Digital Rights Association and Miren Gutiérrez, Prof. at the University of Deusto and Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute.
Most importantly, our team will be strengthened by a new PhD candidate: Guillén Torres. For the past years, he has been working on transparency, public sector information and open data, through different projects within two NGO’s: ControlaTuGobierno (which means Control Your Government) and PIDES Social Innovation. As a preliminary plan, he will devote his time to investigate how data plays a role as an intermediary between citizens, the state and other emerging organisations, and how the politics around the process generate asymmetries of power, producing relatively exclusive scopes of action. Welcome Guillén!
Lonneke was quoted in ‘Online activism always remains a cat-and-mouse game‘ (in Dutch), published on Vice Versa, the journalist platform for global collaboration. She elaborates on the act of digital resilience that pop-up in various forms of citizen practices like ‘privacy-cafés’ and ‘crypto parties’.
Moreover, she was an expert guest at the student radio channel Radio Swammerdam. Hosted from within the Amsterdam public library, she discusses data activism and surveillance issues in very practical terms. Listen to a part of the interview below (in Dutch), kindly made available by Radio Swammerdam.
By: Radio Swammerdam from the
“Revolutie I: Data activisme en de (r)evolutie van de kraker”
Licensed under: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
The full episode is available at https://soundcloud.com/swammerdam
The DATACTIVE team will host a session at AIOR2016 Big Data Meet Grassroots Activism, Berlin, 5-8 October, 2016
Stefania Milan, Lonneke van der Velden, Jonathan Gray, Becky Kazansky, Frederike Kaltheuner
How are data and information changing contemporary activism? How do individuals and collectives resist massive data collection? How do they take advantage of the increasing availability of data for advocacy and social change?
Citizens are increasingly aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. This awareness translates into new forms of civic engagement and sociotechnical practices that creatively combine complex information, software and platforms, and political activism. However, to date little has been said about the relation between the organized civil society, activism, and big data broadly defined. In particular, the dimension of collective action, the shaping role of technology and software environments, and the impact of big data on the civil society’s ecosystem remain largely unexplored.
This fishbowl session aims at stimulating an interdisciplinary debate on the interplay between big data broadly defined and grassroots activism. It intends to involve scholars of internet studies, science and technology studies, platform and software studies, as well as political sociology and activism. It evokes internet culture and practices, collective identities and organizational forms, activism and social justice, looking for their entanglement with software and code, platforms, and sociotechnical interfaces that facilitate grassroots’ engagement with data and information.
The five initial participants will contribute to set the agenda of the debate, by offering 5-minute presentations on the different aspects of the suggested theme, namely: data activism, open source intelligence and the use of devices to ‘watch the watchers’, open data for social change, activism and predictive analytics, anti-surveillance and privacy activism.
Expected outcomes include a) an interdisciplinary debate on the intersection of big data and grassroots activism structured around the fish’s ice-breaker presentations, and b) the creation of a network of interested individuals working on the interplay between big data and the civil society broadly defined.
Stefania Milan and Becky Kazanksky participate in the ‘Authoritarian power and practices in the digital age’ workshop, organised by Marlies Glasius at the University of Amsterdam September 22-23, 2016
Stefania Milan, Annalisa Pelizza (University of Twente) and Francesca Musiani (CNRS) organised a track at 4S/EASTT (european association for the study of science and technology) on “Materialising Governance by Information Infrastructure” and gave a joint presentation “Embedding rules and values in information technology infrastructure: A reflection”. Lonneke van der Velden presented at 4S/EASTT on Open Source Intelligence as a form of data activism.
Just in time for the Contentious Data kick-off workshop on September 15, we are happy to announce that DATACTIVE has a new logo! The design is by Federica Bardelli and Carlo De Gaetano, who explain the concept as follows:
“A word (DATACTIVE) is a data point that can be encrypted, hidden and disguised – both in its shape and meaning. It is also and action of communication, a statement of resistance and awareness.
In reference to the lo-fi printing/photocopy techniques of the 70’s punk fanzines and to the recent rediscovery of that visual language by the new wave of experimental design clusters (see: Metahaven) we scanned the word DATACTIVE as an action of re-appropriation of meaningful data. Moving the printed word on the scanner multiple times generates new shapes, new distortions, meaning the active and evolving nature of both DATACTIVE objects of study and therefore of DATACTIVE itself.”
If you like the design by Federica Bardelli and Carlo De Gaetano, please check out their portfolios here and here.
