Evelyn Ruppert
Some information about me
Profile
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After receiving my Master’s degree in 1986, I worked for 11 years as a professional planner and government policy advisor and consultant. I then returned to university to complete a doctorate in sociology (2002). From 2002 - 2008, I was part of an interdisciplinary team (sociology, history, geography) of 12 researchers and government agencies (Statistics Canada and the Library and Archives of Canada) responsible for building a series of databases (microdata, textual data, geocodes) on the 1911-51 Canadian censuses of population (http://www.ccri.uottawa.ca/CCRI/index.htm). From 2004-8, I was Assistant Professor (Sociology) at Trent University (Canada).
I was a Sr Research Fellow at CRESC from 2009 - 13 and am now a Sr Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Within CRESC I co-convened (initially with Mike Savage and then John Law) the interconnecting theme, The Social Life of Methods (SLOM). I was also director of a research programme called Enactments of the OU's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) (http://www8.open.ac.uk/ccig/programmes/enactments).
For updates on my profile please see the link below.
Summary
I am a Data Sociologist and my focus is on how different socio-technical devices organise and constitute populations as objects of knowledge and governing. I have examined censuses as one such device and my recently completed ESRC-funded project, The Last Census, extended this to contemporary practices and modes of expertise involved in ‘assembling’ identities through networked and joined government administrative databases. I am interested in how these devices enact different kinds of populations and the different forms of power and intervention they make possible. I am also examining how government data is used to compile indicators and indices of the performance of populations, how digitised data ‘travels’ and is made public through various government websites and the devices that are developed and used to analyse and interpret 'big data.'
Another area of governance that I am interested in concerns how populations are managed through material interventions in cities. In the past I have done this through the analysis of large scale urban remaking projects (The Moral Economy of Cities) and currently through the investigation of micro-interventions - the more mundane administrative and engineering practices involved in designing everyday objects that mediate and govern conduct in urban space such as the street bollard.
Current projects within the Social Life of Methods include the following:
1. The Social Lives of Digital Data-Objects is a collaboration that I am leading with colleagues in the UK, France and the Netherlands. Our collaboration aims to undertake various projects to advance the social scientific analysis of ’big data’ and digital practices through multi-sited empirical analyses of ‘digital data-objects’ (DDOs). I am leading our first project - Socialising Big Data: identifying the risks and vulnerabilities of digital data-objects - an ESRC strategic investment and collaboration between colleagues at CRESC and Cesagen and the Warwick and Northwest DTCs. To begin in April 2013, we will be investigating the risks and challenges of 'big data' such as privacy, security, relevance, accuracy, representativeness, and stability and how these qualities make ways of knowing vulnerable to various forms of failure. Our concern is with how big data creates new vulnerabilities in part because of the tendency to overlook the social lives of data-objects, which are neither natural nor technical phenomena, but enacted and sustained through multiple and selective social practices.
2. Peopling Europe: Enacting Population investigates how governing the EU is bound up with methods of knowing who constitutes the European population. While questions of EU identity are central to the European project, the focus is on how specific practices such as methods of enumeration enact the ‘people’ of Europe. As part of this I am doing a study of how new information and communication technologies (ICTs), in addition to other things, are stimulating methodological diversification amongst member states such that the usual field and questionnaire based method of enumeration is being increasingly replaced by joined up government administrative and population register databases. Additionally, I am examining how 'big data' practices are challenging official statistics and the way that phenomena such as the 'economy' and 'population' are represented and enacted.
3. Doing the Transparent State is a study of the UK government's Transparency Agenda as a generative device that produces a data public, enacts the transparent state and at the same time renders transparency elusive. I develop these propositions to think more generally about various transparency devices such as audits and indicators.
4. Knowing and Communicating Riots is a pilot project with OU colleagues Sarah Neal and Karim Murji that explores how young people communicated and knew about the UK 'riots' through a vareity of digital and other methods.
5. The Baroque as Empirical Sensibility is a project I am co-leading with John Law which asks a number of questions: what can we learn from the baroque, the material character of its art forms, and its sense of the relations between body, experience, and technique? What can we learn from its recognition of its own performativity? How might we use features of the baroque to enrich contemporary empirical research? How has the baroque been used as a resource to resist power and express other concerns, or as a tool for exploring the alternative versions of history?
6. Enacting Streets seeks to examine how the concept of enactment can open up a different way of studying and understanding streets as microcosms of material, social and political relations. Il examine how streets are multiply enacted, dynamically brought into being, sustained and/or abandoned through various practices and what this means for the methods through which we come to 'know' streets.
Publications
Working Paper
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Simon Carter, Francis Dodsworth, Evelyn Ruppert, Sophie Watson (2011), 'Thinking Cities Through Objects', CRESC Working Paper 096.
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John Law, Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage (2011), 'The Double Social Life of Methods', CRESC Working Paper 095.
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Mike Savage, Evelyn Ruppert and John Law (2010), 'Digital Devices: nine theses', CRESC Working Paper 86.
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Evelyn Ruppert (2009), 'Numbers Regimes: From Censuses to Metrics', CRESC Working Paper 68.
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Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage (2009), 'New Populations: Scoping Paper on Digital Transactional Data', CRESC Working Paper 74.
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Evelyn Ruppert (2007), 'Producing Population', CRESC Working Paper 37.
Refereed Journal Papers
Book Chapters
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Evelyn Ruppert (2010), 'Making Population: From Censuses to Metrics', 157-173, in Leon Hempel, Susanne Krasmann and Ulrich Bröckling (eds), Sichtbarkeitsregime: Überwachung, Sicherheit Und Privatheit Im 21. Jahrhundert (Visibility Regimes: Monitoring, Security and Privacy in the 21st Century), Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, available at Leviathan Sonderheft 25.
Book
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Evelyn Ruppert (2006), 'The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens', Toronto: University of Toronto Press, available at UTP.
Projects
Social life of methods
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In ‘the challenge of the digital’ we explore how social science methods and research are being challenged and reconfigured by developments in the collection, storage, networking,...
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In this project we ask
- How have social habits, identities, attitudes, opinions and feelings been historically constructed through devices such as the census, surveys, polls, market...
Urban Experiments
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The project develops a methodology for studying city objects by investigating street bollards as socio-material practices that make up the city of London. I begin with posing a series of...
Events
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Thu, Mar 10th 2011 - Fri, Mar 11th 2011
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Tue, Mar 1st 2011
This is a meeting of our regular Social Life of Method reading group. The reading group meets about once a month. All CRESC members welcome.
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Wed, Jun 8th 2011
Penny Harvey and Evelyn Ruppert will be speaking at a workshop organised by methods@manchester on 'Research methods and social responsibility'.
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Mon, May 14th 2012
Sorry: this event, previously arranged for Monday 14th May, has been cancelled
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Thu, Jun 21st 2012
The seminar brings together two anthropologists and photographers in discussion about photography and the postcolonial: Chris Pinney, Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture, UCL and Patricia Spyer, Professor and Chair, Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Contemporary Indonesia, Leiden University and Mark Sealy, Director, Autograph. Seminar to be followed by a reception from 17:00 - 18:00. Registration is free but to secure your place please send an email to Bussie Awosanya (Olubusola.Awosanya@manchester.ac.uk).
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Thu, Apr 19th 2012
CRESC members, in affiliation with OU's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), are hosting a keynote lecture and interview with Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam) on the theme of enactment. For more information and to reserve a place please see: http://www8.open.ac.uk/ccig/events/ccig-forum-26
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Wed, Dec 5th 2012
A seminar with Professor Mariana Valverde, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto, Canada. The seminar is co-sponsored by CRESC Urban Experiments and OU's Open Space Research Centre.
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Wed, Nov 14th 2012
The Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) and the Open University's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) are pleased to announce an event planned in connection with the release of a new book, Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR country, by Vron Ware (Palgrave MacMillan).



