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.