Evelyn Ruppert
Biographic Data
| ID | 107670 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Evelyn Ruppert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Evelyn |
| FAMILY NAME | Ruppert |
| SIGNATURE | RUPPERT E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7781-1491 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 654 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Imagining Citizens as More than Data Subjects: A Methodography of a Collaborative Design Workshop on Co-producing Official Statistics
The article presents a methodography of a collaborative design workshop conducted with national and international statisticians. The workshop was part of an ethnographic research project on innovation in European official statistics. It aimed to bring academic researchers and statisticians together to collaborate on the design of app prototypes that imagine citizens as co-producers of official statistics rather than only data subjects. However, t…
Data Practices: Making up a European People
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
The birth of sensory power: How a pandemic made it visible
Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as 'surveillance capitalism', 'gig economy', 'quantified self', 'algorithmic governmentality', 'data colonialism', 'data subjects' and 'digital citizens'. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins of modern power in its three major forms: sov…
Doing a transversal method: Developing an Ethics of Care in a Collaborative Research Project
Beck and Sznaider call on 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology s…
Methods as forces of subjectivation: Experiments in the Remaking of Official Statistics
We develop the concept of methods as ‘forces of subjectivation’ in relation to experiments we have encountered in a study of government methods for generating official population statistics. These experiments problematise the subjects of traditional methods based on paper questionnaires and offer new digital technologies and data sources as possible solutions. We reflect on these experiments in relation to recent work on sociological and digital …
Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights
Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert in…
Data Politics
Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert in…
Data’s empire
The chapter examines the various ways that data captures and colonises minds, souls, bodies and spaces and makes data subjects through practices of production, accumulation, aggregation, circulation, valuation, and interpretation. We draw attention to how these practices operate together yet differently in the metropole and postcolony and produce different data subjects. By first describing how European empires in the nineteenth century invented …
Citizen Data and Trust in Official Statistics
Many, if not most, big data are connected to the lives of citizens: their movements, opinions, and relations. Arguably big data and citizens are inseparable: from smartphones, meters, fridges and cars to internet platforms, the data of digital technologies is the data of citizens. In addition to raising political and ethical issues of privacy, confidentiality and data protection, this calls for rethinking relations to citizens in the production o…
Population Geometries of Europe: The Topologies of Data Cubes and Grids
The political integration of the European Union (EU) is fragile for many reasons, not least the reassertion of nationalism. That said, if we examine specific practices and infrastructures, a more complicated story emerges. We juxtapose the political fragility of the EU in relation to the ongoing formation of data infrastructures in official statistics that take part in postnational enactments of Europe’s populations and territories. We develop th…
Peopling Europe through Data Practices: Introduction to the Special Issue
Politically, Europe has been unable to address itself to a constituted polity and people as more than an agglomeration of nation-states. From the resurgence of nationalisms to the crisis of the single currency and the unprecedented decision of a member state to leave the European Union (EU), core questions about the future of Europe have been rearticulated: Who are the people of Europe? Is there a European identity? What does it mean to say, “I a…
Producing and projecting data: Aesthetic practices of government data portals
We develop the concept of 'aesthetic practices' to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education's Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required s…
Enacting migration through data practices
Introduction to an edited special issue (SI) based on presentations at a workshop, Peopling ‘Europe’ through Data Practices, organized by the members of the ARITHMUS project as part of the study of how methodological changes in the production of population statistics within the EU affect the enactment of populations as objects of government. The contributions study data practices through which the people of Europe are enumerated, classified, narr…
The Politics of Method: Taming the New, Making Data Official
Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and the emergence of new actors promising to produce more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as 'big data.' This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods become legitimate and official? We approach this question by conceiving of official statistics as pa…
The Governmental Topologies of Database Devices
Data politics
The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the reconfiguration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accum…
Big Data: Issues for an International Political Sociology of Data Practices: Table 1
The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented questions about the increasing datafication …
Rethinking empirical social sciences
I consider some arguments of social science and humanities researchers about the challenge that big data presents for social science methods. What they suggest is that social scientists need to engage with big data rather than retreat into internal debates about its meaning and implications. Instead, understanding big data requires and provides an opportunity for the interdisciplinary development of methods that innovatively, critically and refle…
Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices
The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mo…
The Social Life of Methods: Devices
The collection focuses on ‘the device’ to explore how methods for knowing and handling the world have their own social life or even triple social life: how they are shaped by the social;work to format social relations; but also how they are used opportunistically by social actors in the systematic pursuit of political, economic and cultural advantage
Anticipating Failure: Transparency Devices and Their Effects
The article explores the politics of making worlds legible, transparent and actionable through devices that governments and international organisations mobilise in the quest to achieve moral certainty about their activities and decisions. Through an analysis of three distinct examples, we examine the effects of such attempts to open things up in the name of the public good: the performance metrics that are part of the UK government's ‘Transparenc…
The Governmental Topologies of Database Devices
In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and id…
Transactional Politics
In spring 2009, revelations over the expense claims of British MPs led to one of the most damaging scandals affecting the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy in recent history. This article explores how this incident reveals the capacity of Web 2.0 devices and transactional data to transform politics. It reflects, graphically, the political power of identifying and knowing people on the basis of their transactions, on what they do rather than w…
Population Objects: Interpassive Subjects
While Foucault described population as the object of biopower he did not investigate the practices that make it possible to know population. Rather, he tended to overemphasize it as an object on which power can act. However, population is not an object awaiting discovery, but is represented and enacted by specific devices such as censuses and what I call population metrics. The latter enact populations by assembling different categories and measu…
Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices
The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mo…
Population Objects: Interpassive Subjects
While Foucault described population as the object of biopower he did not investigate the practices that make it possible to know population. Rather, he tended to overemphasize it as an object on which power can act. However, population is not an object awaiting discovery, but is represented and enacted by specific devices such as censuses and what I call population metrics. The latter enact populations by assembling different categories and measu…
The Governmental Topologies of Database Devices
In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and id…
Enacting migration through data practices
Introduction to an edited special issue (SI) based on presentations at a workshop, Peopling ‘Europe’ through Data Practices, organized by the members of the ARITHMUS project as part of the study of how methodological changes in the production of population statistics within the EU affect the enactment of populations as objects of government. The contributions study data practices through which the people of Europe are enumerated, classified, narr…
The Social Life of Methods: Devices
The collection focuses on ‘the device’ to explore how methods for knowing and handling the world have their own social life or even triple social life: how they are shaped by the social;work to format social relations; but also how they are used opportunistically by social actors in the systematic pursuit of political, economic and cultural advantage
Data politics
The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the reconfiguration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accum…
The birth of sensory power: How a pandemic made it visible
Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as 'surveillance capitalism', 'gig economy', 'quantified self', 'algorithmic governmentality', 'data colonialism', 'data subjects' and 'digital citizens'. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins of modern power in its three major forms: sov…
Anticipating Failure: Transparency Devices and Their Effects
The article explores the politics of making worlds legible, transparent and actionable through devices that governments and international organisations mobilise in the quest to achieve moral certainty about their activities and decisions. Through an analysis of three distinct examples, we examine the effects of such attempts to open things up in the name of the public good: the performance metrics that are part of the UK government's ‘Transparenc…
Rights to Public Space: Regulatory Reconfigurations of Liberty
I define how public space is constituted not by real property but by a regime made up of regulatory practices. What is at issue in assertions about the decline of public space is that this regulatory regime is reconfiguring liberty—that is, rights to public space—through a change in the conception of the public, of who and what belong as part of the public. By way of a case study (the redevelopment of the corner of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Tor…
Big Data: Issues for an International Political Sociology of Data Practices: Table 1
The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented questions about the increasing datafication …
Peopling Europe through Data Practices: Introduction to the Special Issue
Politically, Europe has been unable to address itself to a constituted polity and people as more than an agglomeration of nation-states. From the resurgence of nationalisms to the crisis of the single currency and the unprecedented decision of a member state to leave the European Union (EU), core questions about the future of Europe have been rearticulated: Who are the people of Europe? Is there a European identity? What does it mean to say, “I a…
The Politics of Method: Taming the New, Making Data Official
Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and the emergence of new actors promising to produce more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as 'big data.' This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods become legitimate and official? We approach this question by conceiving of official statistics as pa…
Population Geometries of Europe: The Topologies of Data Cubes and Grids
The political integration of the European Union (EU) is fragile for many reasons, not least the reassertion of nationalism. That said, if we examine specific practices and infrastructures, a more complicated story emerges. We juxtapose the political fragility of the EU in relation to the ongoing formation of data infrastructures in official statistics that take part in postnational enactments of Europe’s populations and territories. We develop th…
Rethinking empirical social sciences
I consider some arguments of social science and humanities researchers about the challenge that big data presents for social science methods. What they suggest is that social scientists need to engage with big data rather than retreat into internal debates about its meaning and implications. Instead, understanding big data requires and provides an opportunity for the interdisciplinary development of methods that innovatively, critically and refle…
Producing and projecting data: Aesthetic practices of government data portals
We develop the concept of 'aesthetic practices' to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education's Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required s…
Becoming Peoples: Counting Heads in Northern Wilds
While the census is sometimes understood to be an objectifying practice that constructs and makes up a population, in this paper I am concerned with how it is necessary to produce census subjects in order to construct population. By drawing on formulations by Latour, Deleuze and Law, I conceive of census taking as a practice performed by heterogeneous socio-technical arrangements of actors – humans, paper forms, categories, concepts, definitions,…
I Is; Therefore I Am: The Census as Practice of Double Identification
I examine practices of modern census making with a specific focus on Canadian censuses of population from 1911-1951. My analysis builds on the work of two recent and related streams of research in the social sciences. One draws from Foucault's writings on biopower and post-Foucauldian governmentality studies. It examines the census as a political technology that produces a specific knowledge or political arithmetic (statistics) of the population,…
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Transactional Politics
In spring 2009, revelations over the expense claims of British MPs led to one of the most damaging scandals affecting the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy in recent history. This article explores how this incident reveals the capacity of Web 2.0 devices and transactional data to transform politics. It reflects, graphically, the political power of identifying and knowing people on the basis of their transactions, on what they do rather than w…
Doing a transversal method: Developing an Ethics of Care in a Collaborative Research Project
Beck and Sznaider call on 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology s…
Census in Context: Documenting and Understanding the Making of Early-Twentieth-Century Canadian Censuses
One of the central goals of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) is to construct a series of contextual databases related to the making and taking of the Canadian decennial censuses during the first half of the twentieth century. These "data on the data" will provide researchers with the evidence necessary to undertake informed and critical analysis of the making, taking, and reception of the census within its historical context. T…
Re-visioning the City
The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens
Ruppert examines the language of planners, urban designers, architects, and marketing analysts to reveal the extent to which moralization legitimizes these professions in the public eye. Disclaimer: Images removed at the request of the rights holder
Rights to Public Space: Regulatory Reconfigurations of Liberty
I define how public space is constituted not by real property but by a regime made up of regulatory practices. What is at issue in assertions about the decline of public space is that this regulatory regime is reconfiguring liberty—that is, rights to public space—through a change in the conception of the public, of who and what belong as part of the public. By way of a case study (the redevelopment of the corner of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Tor…
Census in Context: Documenting and Understanding the Making of Early-Twentieth-Century Canadian Censuses
One of the central goals of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) is to construct a series of contextual databases related to the making and taking of the Canadian decennial censuses during the first half of the twentieth century. These "data on the data" will provide researchers with the evidence necessary to undertake informed and critical analysis of the making, taking, and reception of the census within its historical context. T…
I Is; Therefore I Am: The Census as Practice of Double Identification
I examine practices of modern census making with a specific focus on Canadian censuses of population from 1911-1951. My analysis builds on the work of two recent and related streams of research in the social sciences. One draws from Foucault's writings on biopower and post-Foucauldian governmentality studies. It examines the census as a political technology that produces a specific knowledge or political arithmetic (statistics) of the population,…
Becoming Peoples: Counting Heads in Northern Wilds
While the census is sometimes understood to be an objectifying practice that constructs and makes up a population, in this paper I am concerned with how it is necessary to produce census subjects in order to construct population. By drawing on formulations by Latour, Deleuze and Law, I conceive of census taking as a practice performed by heterogeneous socio-technical arrangements of actors – humans, paper forms, categories, concepts, definitions,…
Transactional Politics
In spring 2009, revelations over the expense claims of British MPs led to one of the most damaging scandals affecting the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy in recent history. This article explores how this incident reveals the capacity of Web 2.0 devices and transactional data to transform politics. It reflects, graphically, the political power of identifying and knowing people on the basis of their transactions, on what they do rather than w…
Population Objects: Interpassive Subjects
While Foucault described population as the object of biopower he did not investigate the practices that make it possible to know population. Rather, he tended to overemphasize it as an object on which power can act. However, population is not an object awaiting discovery, but is represented and enacted by specific devices such as censuses and what I call population metrics. The latter enact populations by assembling different categories and measu…
The Governmental Topologies of Database Devices
In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and id…
Rethinking empirical social sciences
I consider some arguments of social science and humanities researchers about the challenge that big data presents for social science methods. What they suggest is that social scientists need to engage with big data rather than retreat into internal debates about its meaning and implications. Instead, understanding big data requires and provides an opportunity for the interdisciplinary development of methods that innovatively, critically and refle…
Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices
The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mo…
The Social Life of Methods: Devices
The collection focuses on ‘the device’ to explore how methods for knowing and handling the world have their own social life or even triple social life: how they are shaped by the social;work to format social relations; but also how they are used opportunistically by social actors in the systematic pursuit of political, economic and cultural advantage
Anticipating Failure: Transparency Devices and Their Effects
The article explores the politics of making worlds legible, transparent and actionable through devices that governments and international organisations mobilise in the quest to achieve moral certainty about their activities and decisions. Through an analysis of three distinct examples, we examine the effects of such attempts to open things up in the name of the public good: the performance metrics that are part of the UK government's ‘Transparenc…
Big Data: Issues for an International Political Sociology of Data Practices: Table 1
The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented questions about the increasing datafication …
Data politics
The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the reconfiguration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accum…
The Governmental Topologies of Database Devices
Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights
Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert in…
Data Politics
Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert in…
Data’s empire
The chapter examines the various ways that data captures and colonises minds, souls, bodies and spaces and makes data subjects through practices of production, accumulation, aggregation, circulation, valuation, and interpretation. We draw attention to how these practices operate together yet differently in the metropole and postcolony and produce different data subjects. By first describing how European empires in the nineteenth century invented …
Citizen Data and Trust in Official Statistics
Many, if not most, big data are connected to the lives of citizens: their movements, opinions, and relations. Arguably big data and citizens are inseparable: from smartphones, meters, fridges and cars to internet platforms, the data of digital technologies is the data of citizens. In addition to raising political and ethical issues of privacy, confidentiality and data protection, this calls for rethinking relations to citizens in the production o…
Population Geometries of Europe: The Topologies of Data Cubes and Grids
The political integration of the European Union (EU) is fragile for many reasons, not least the reassertion of nationalism. That said, if we examine specific practices and infrastructures, a more complicated story emerges. We juxtapose the political fragility of the EU in relation to the ongoing formation of data infrastructures in official statistics that take part in postnational enactments of Europe’s populations and territories. We develop th…
Peopling Europe through Data Practices: Introduction to the Special Issue
Politically, Europe has been unable to address itself to a constituted polity and people as more than an agglomeration of nation-states. From the resurgence of nationalisms to the crisis of the single currency and the unprecedented decision of a member state to leave the European Union (EU), core questions about the future of Europe have been rearticulated: Who are the people of Europe? Is there a European identity? What does it mean to say, “I a…
Producing and projecting data: Aesthetic practices of government data portals
We develop the concept of 'aesthetic practices' to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education's Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required s…
Enacting migration through data practices
Introduction to an edited special issue (SI) based on presentations at a workshop, Peopling ‘Europe’ through Data Practices, organized by the members of the ARITHMUS project as part of the study of how methodological changes in the production of population statistics within the EU affect the enactment of populations as objects of government. The contributions study data practices through which the people of Europe are enumerated, classified, narr…
The Politics of Method: Taming the New, Making Data Official
Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and the emergence of new actors promising to produce more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as 'big data.' This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods become legitimate and official? We approach this question by conceiving of official statistics as pa…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Data Analysis and Archiving (11 works) · Data science (11 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Law (7 works)