Summary

My work is in the sociology of governance. I explore methods of enumerating and managing populations and 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 recent ESRC-funded project, The Last Census,extends 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 digital data.

Another area of governance that I am interested in concerns how populations are governed  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 proposed project that I am leading with colleagues in the UK, France and the Netherlands. The project involves multi-sited empirical analyses of ‘digital data-objects’ (DDOs) and the specific socio-technical practices and enacting moments when DDOs emerge, travel, do things, have effects, change, decline and disappear.  Five DDOs—young offenders, carbon, disease, water and border crossers—are to be investigated towards understanding how digital practices treat people as things and things as people.  A bid for funding has been submitted to the Open Research Area in Europe (ESRC/ANR/NWO).

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 methods of enumeration enact who are understood to be the ‘people’ of Europe.

3. Witnessing the 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 impossible. 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'.

5. Enacting Streets is a project I am leading as part of my work with the Enactments Programme of OU's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG).  The project seeks to examine how the concept of enactment can open up a different way of studying and understanding streets as microcosms of social and political relations. It will 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.