Big Data &Society, Volume 11, Issue 2, April-June 2024.
The proliferation of environmentally oriented programs within the tech industry, and the industry's coinciding efforts toward data and technology democratization, generate concerns about the status of environmental data within digital economy. While the accumulation of digital personal data has been a cornerstone of domination of the data analytics industry, many believe environmental data to be a source of “untapped potential.” The potential of environmental data, the argument goes, would benefit equally the digital economy, environmental sciences, and academic data and artificial intelligence experts. This article analyzes the proliferation of the rhetoric about open environmental data by focusing on Microsoft's Planetary Computer cloud computing program and computer vision experts who curate and use biodiversity data stored on Microsoft's servers. Through an analytical framework of sociotechnical imaginaries, the article draws connections between visions of future for environmental knowledge production and governance promoted by Microsoft and the work of computer vision experts intending to benefit from the potential of environmental data as machine learning training sets while at the same time helping environmental sciences. Although environmental data on the Planetary Computer is democratized, it nonetheless becomes a valued asset to data economy, but often with unintended consequences, such as enabling citizen science biodiversity data to be used by state surveillance apparatus. The article challenges the view that data's democratization is unproblematically serving environmental sciences by examining the consequences of imaginaries of democratization emerging from the data industry leaders and processes of nonmonetary valuation of environmental data by experts who curate these datasets.
Category Archives: Arts and Health
Role-based privacy cynicism and local privacy activism: How data stewards navigate privacy in higher education
Big Data &Society, Volume 11, Issue 2, April-June 2024.
This study examines the impact of role-based constraints on privacy cynicism within higher education, a workplace increasingly subjected to surveillance. Using a thematic analysis of 15 in-depth interviews conducted between 2017 and 2023 with data stewards in the California State University System, the research explores the reasons behind data stewards’ privacy cynicism, despite their knowledge of privacy and their own ability to protect it. We investigate how academic data custodians navigate four role-based tensions: the conflict between the institutional and personal definitions of privacy; the mutual reinforcement between their privacy-cynical attitudes and their perceptions of student privacy attitudes; the influence of role constraints on data stewards’ privacy-protective behaviors; and the contrast between the negatively valued societal surveillance and the positively valued university surveillance. The findings underscore the significance of considering organizational privacy cultures and role-based expectations in studying privacy cynicism. The study contributes to the theoretical understanding of privacy cynicism and offers practical implications for organizations, emphasizing the importance of aligning organizational definitions of privacy with employees’ understanding. Future research should further explore the mutual reinforcement of privacy cynicism in the relationship between data providers and data consumers (which we call the “spiral of resignation”) and consider the impact of role-based constraints in other organizational contexts.
This study examines the impact of role-based constraints on privacy cynicism within higher education, a workplace increasingly subjected to surveillance. Using a thematic analysis of 15 in-depth interviews conducted between 2017 and 2023 with data stewards in the California State University System, the research explores the reasons behind data stewards’ privacy cynicism, despite their knowledge of privacy and their own ability to protect it. We investigate how academic data custodians navigate four role-based tensions: the conflict between the institutional and personal definitions of privacy; the mutual reinforcement between their privacy-cynical attitudes and their perceptions of student privacy attitudes; the influence of role constraints on data stewards’ privacy-protective behaviors; and the contrast between the negatively valued societal surveillance and the positively valued university surveillance. The findings underscore the significance of considering organizational privacy cultures and role-based expectations in studying privacy cynicism. The study contributes to the theoretical understanding of privacy cynicism and offers practical implications for organizations, emphasizing the importance of aligning organizational definitions of privacy with employees’ understanding. Future research should further explore the mutual reinforcement of privacy cynicism in the relationship between data providers and data consumers (which we call the “spiral of resignation”) and consider the impact of role-based constraints in other organizational contexts.
No national plans. Tackling radicalisation and discrimination with the effort of civil society in Greece and Romania
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A Partnership of Convenience? Transnational Civil Society, International Organisations and Practices of Global Order
Who Governs Access and Voice of Civil Society in Global Governance? Practice Theory, Reflexivity and Power in the Study of International Organisations’ “Opening Up”
Civilizational Deviation in Collective Mediation: A Comparative Analysis of the Cretan Question and the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict
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Becoming a young radical right activist: Biographical pathways of the members of radical right organisations in Poland and Germany
Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
With the increasing popularity of the radical right, much research has tried to explain the motives of voters. Less attention has been paid to the motives of people to become radical right activists – specifically young people, a group with a high tendency to join right-wing parties. Within the context of the internationalisation of the radical right, this article draws on 28 narrative interviews conducted between 2019 and 2021 with young radical right activists in Poland and Germany, two countries with considerably different political and discursive opportunity structures. We propose to recognise a new motive for becoming involved in political activism: career-oriented individual self-realisation in Germany, as opposed to fulfilling a duty to the nation in Poland. While we identify two different types of radical activism within the different contexts – the (nationalist) anti-establishment populist career type in Germany and the (nationalist) anti-political intellectualism/elitism type in Poland – they both point to the normalisation of the radical right in the two countries.
With the increasing popularity of the radical right, much research has tried to explain the motives of voters. Less attention has been paid to the motives of people to become radical right activists – specifically young people, a group with a high tendency to join right-wing parties. Within the context of the internationalisation of the radical right, this article draws on 28 narrative interviews conducted between 2019 and 2021 with young radical right activists in Poland and Germany, two countries with considerably different political and discursive opportunity structures. We propose to recognise a new motive for becoming involved in political activism: career-oriented individual self-realisation in Germany, as opposed to fulfilling a duty to the nation in Poland. While we identify two different types of radical activism within the different contexts – the (nationalist) anti-establishment populist career type in Germany and the (nationalist) anti-political intellectualism/elitism type in Poland – they both point to the normalisation of the radical right in the two countries.
Scalar tensions and the representation of the queer Spanish nation-state: A thematic analysis of Drag Race Spain
Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
RuPaul’s Drag Race has globally produced 16 nationally franchised versions of the show. Queer scholarship has studied this franchising of queer culture by applying the model of glocalization, where the U.S. show is adapted to the local queer market in the franchising nation-state. I thematically analyzed the first two seasons of Drag Race Spain (DRS) and viewership in the Països Catalans region of Spain to investigate how three scalar tensions (U.S. Superstructure, Defining Spain, and Exporting Spain) structure queer culture on the show. I concluded that the representation of the nation-state on DRS masks the queer geographic diversity of Spain and the international market’s influence on the country’s representation.
RuPaul’s Drag Race has globally produced 16 nationally franchised versions of the show. Queer scholarship has studied this franchising of queer culture by applying the model of glocalization, where the U.S. show is adapted to the local queer market in the franchising nation-state. I thematically analyzed the first two seasons of Drag Race Spain (DRS) and viewership in the Països Catalans region of Spain to investigate how three scalar tensions (U.S. Superstructure, Defining Spain, and Exporting Spain) structure queer culture on the show. I concluded that the representation of the nation-state on DRS masks the queer geographic diversity of Spain and the international market’s influence on the country’s representation.
Place-based just transition: domains, components and costs
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Changing norms of older men’s sexuality in the sexological discourse during Czechoslovak socialism: Dementia as an interpretative lens to make sense of sexual expressions in later life
Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
This article examines the development of medical (primarily sexological) knowledge about older men’s sexuality during Czechoslovak socialism. Analysing medical and criminological journals, sexological textbooks and popular-science publications, and inspired by Ian Hacking’s theory of making up people (1995), we track how Czechoslovak experts created new kinds of older people. We show that the founder of Czechoslovak sexology, Josef Hynie, implemented the kind of older men with dementia with pathological sexuality into sexological discourse in 1940. In the following decades, medical experts omitted older men’s sexuality or debated it solely in the context of paedophilic delinquency, thus perpetuating Hynie’s ideas about the pathological sexuality of men with dementia until the second half of the 1970s. We explain how the classification was subsequently replaced by a new kind of healthy older men with active sexuality, which the sexologists made up hand in hand with incorporating new knowledge about sexual delinquents and changing ideas about active ageing. We argue that dementia served for the experts as a tool for defining what could be seen as normal or pathological ageing as well as normal or pathological ageing male sexuality. Finally, we highlight that the liberalisation of ageing male sexuality occurred in socialist Czechoslovakia at approximately the same time as in Western capitalist countries.
This article examines the development of medical (primarily sexological) knowledge about older men’s sexuality during Czechoslovak socialism. Analysing medical and criminological journals, sexological textbooks and popular-science publications, and inspired by Ian Hacking’s theory of making up people (1995), we track how Czechoslovak experts created new kinds of older people. We show that the founder of Czechoslovak sexology, Josef Hynie, implemented the kind of older men with dementia with pathological sexuality into sexological discourse in 1940. In the following decades, medical experts omitted older men’s sexuality or debated it solely in the context of paedophilic delinquency, thus perpetuating Hynie’s ideas about the pathological sexuality of men with dementia until the second half of the 1970s. We explain how the classification was subsequently replaced by a new kind of healthy older men with active sexuality, which the sexologists made up hand in hand with incorporating new knowledge about sexual delinquents and changing ideas about active ageing. We argue that dementia served for the experts as a tool for defining what could be seen as normal or pathological ageing as well as normal or pathological ageing male sexuality. Finally, we highlight that the liberalisation of ageing male sexuality occurred in socialist Czechoslovakia at approximately the same time as in Western capitalist countries.