Evelyn Ruppert

Some information about me

Profile

  • 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 joined CRESC in 2008 and am a Senior Research Fellow.  Within CRESC I co-convene (with John Law) the interconnecting theme, The Social Life of Methods (SLOM).  I also co-direct (with Vicki Squire) a research programme called Enactments of the OU's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) (http://www8.open.ac.uk/ccig/programmes/enactments).

    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.

Publications

Projects

Social life of methods

  • 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,...

  • 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

  • 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...

Blog

  • The issue that my colleague Penny Harvey raises about categories and form-filling in her blog - Anomalous Categories: the 2011 census - points to more general issues about devices governments use to constitute their populations. In addition to being a statement on what categories count and what aspects of the life of a teenager matter to governing authorities, the census is also a device that...

  • Previously I pondered how the Wikileaks embassy cables might next be subjected to the numerous tools and software now available to interpret content such as word pattern analysis. A recent example provides some clues. In December 2010 an article published in Science (‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’) described how a team of some 12...

  • The release of embassy cables consisting of some 251,287 dispatches from more than 250 worldwide US embassies and consulates the WikiLeaks, has led to the declaration of the first global cyberwar.  As Julian Assange is held in solitary confinement at Wandsworth prison, hackivists are mounting attacks on those who have targeted WikiLeaks, from credit card firms to online companies.

    It is instructive that the government policy of...

Events