Noah Mcclain
Biographic Data
| ID | 269822 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Noah Mcclain |
| GIVEN NAMES | Noah |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcclain |
| SIGNATURE | MCCLAIN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Illinois Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4285-1546 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Theories and Politics of Covid-19
This issue brings theoretically driven analyses to bear on the COVID-19 pandemic, a development which shines a singularly revealing light on some of the most significant political, cultural, and social trends of the 21st century. Leading off with three explicitly theoretical treatments of the pandemic, this issue directs several complementary lenses at the early stages of the pandemic as it unfolded in the US and Europe. The initial contributions…
Gig Work, Telework, Precarity, and the Pandemic
This issue examines technology-driven economic developments during the global COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Specifically, the articles cover the ways that gig work, the platform economy, and remote work have evolved during the course of the pandemic. The issue leads with articles that chart the interplay of the platform economy with various facets of the pandemic from the inequalities and risks faced by gig workers to marke…
Prison, Material-Organizational Bricolage, and Precarious Frameworks of Normality in an Era of Disruption
Prison scholars have long noted prisoners' improvisation with materials and resources at hand (or bricolage) in ways that defy the prison regime. Yet longstanding scholarly perspectives which cite such bricolage as evidence for themes like "prison culture" or "resistance" have often distracted scholars from accounting for the specific features of organizational materials and operations that prisoners leverage in their bricolage, and distracted fr…
Meming the Catch-22: Doing security where the steel wheel hits the rail
While Internet memes are often treated as artifacts which play with broad cultural elements, they can also take on distinctive meanings within narrow communities of practice or organizational membership. This article demonstrates how interrogating a certain interpretation of a meme, and a sort of humor found within it, can reveal elements of viewers’ situated experience. In other words, I argue that when we get a joke, we begin to understand a wo…
Introduction: Meditating crisis: Covid-19 and beyond
This paper provides a summary of content in this special issue
The Death-Based Model of Organizational Learning: Accident, Pandemic, and Workplace Change in New York Public Transit
The public transportation workers of New York City lost their lives to COVID-19 at a shocking rate in the spring of 2020, likely abetted by their employer's resistance to allow workers to wear masks until mere days before a region-wide lockdown was declared. We might see this death toll as a tragic outcome of uncertainty in the face of the unprecedented, yet the stance of the employer (the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA) was consis…
Cascading Crises: Society in the Age of Covid-19
The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic-unlike other crises-have impacted almost every facet of our l…
Global perspectives on digital inequalities and solutions to them
In this special issue of First Monday, Global perspectives on digital inequalities and solutions to them we bring together scholars from five continents to offer a vista of the field of digital inequalities at the close of the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” We have chosen First Monday to publish our scholarship thanks to the foundational work in open access publishing by Edward J. Valauskas, Chief Editor and Founder. First Monday’s app…
Digital inequalities in time of pandemic: Covid-19 exposure risk profiles and new forms of vulnerability
In this article, we argue that new kinds of risk are emerging with the COVID-19 virus, and that these risks are unequally distributed. As we expose to view, digital inequalities and social inequalities are rendering certain subgroups significantly more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19. Vulnerable populations bearing disproportionate risks include the social isolated, older adults, penal system subjects, digitally disadvantaged students, gig wor…
Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control
Virtuality and Offense in a Crime Scene of Technology
Can projections of technology, constituting virtual worlds, make our actions criminal? This article examines the interpretation of human action jointly with and through its technological context in ways that frame human criminality. I draw from a case of the criminalization of devices used for a “hustle” of the urban poor in the New York City subway. The case demonstrates how people can unwittingly be made into avatars said to act with purpose an…
Caught inside the black box: Criminalization, opaque technology, and the New York subway MetroCard
This article investigates how an account of hidden, internal properties of an everyday technology became a framework to interpret human action as a serious crime. Using a case study situated in the New York subway system, I examine the criminalization of a practice of New York’s poor known as “selling swipes” performed by so-called “swipers”. A high court came to classify the practice as felony forgery, interpreting it though an expert-witness ac…
The horizons of technological control: Automated surveillance in the New York subway
Surveillance technologies may be capable of monitoring a domain, but they need a sufficiently orderly domain to monitor. This article examines the secretive effort to institute artificial-intelligence-based 'smart surveillance' in the New York subway, using object- and pattern-recognition algorithms to identify dangerous activities in video feeds, such as a person abandoning a package. By considering the necessary preconditions for computer visio…
Free to those who can afford it: The everyday affordance of privilege
America Identified: Biometric Technology and Society
Things at Work: Informal social-material mechanisms for getting the job done
Through interviews and field observations, we examine how New York subway workers consume official workplace equipment, particularly how they informally deploy such artifacts towards individual and collective ends. We discuss the ways workers call on artifacts to manage routine concerns of work contexts — physical vulnerabilities, bureaucratic constraints, and difficult persons amongst them. We show how sustained attention to a public infrastruct…
Dealing with urban terror: Heritages of Control, Varieties of Intervention, Strategies of Research
The events of September 11th bring urgency to problems of urban security, both in terms of finding ways to protect cities from attacks by terrorists and also protecting urban life from repressive measures that form in reaction to those attacks. We outline a rationale for urbanists to participate in analysis and policy-formulation on security issues and examine the utility of past urban research strategies, including criminology, in terms of their…
Things at Work: Informal social-material mechanisms for getting the job done
Through interviews and field observations, we examine how New York subway workers consume official workplace equipment, particularly how they informally deploy such artifacts towards individual and collective ends. We discuss the ways workers call on artifacts to manage routine concerns of work contexts — physical vulnerabilities, bureaucratic constraints, and difficult persons amongst them. We show how sustained attention to a public infrastruct…
Cascading Crises: Society in the Age of Covid-19
The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic-unlike other crises-have impacted almost every facet of our l…
Dealing with urban terror: Heritages of Control, Varieties of Intervention, Strategies of Research
The events of September 11th bring urgency to problems of urban security, both in terms of finding ways to protect cities from attacks by terrorists and also protecting urban life from repressive measures that form in reaction to those attacks. We outline a rationale for urbanists to participate in analysis and policy-formulation on security issues and examine the utility of past urban research strategies, including criminology, in terms of their…
Free to those who can afford it: The everyday affordance of privilege
Caught inside the black box: Criminalization, opaque technology, and the New York subway MetroCard
This article investigates how an account of hidden, internal properties of an everyday technology became a framework to interpret human action as a serious crime. Using a case study situated in the New York subway system, I examine the criminalization of a practice of New York’s poor known as “selling swipes” performed by so-called “swipers”. A high court came to classify the practice as felony forgery, interpreting it though an expert-witness ac…
Dealing with urban terror: Heritages of Control, Varieties of Intervention, Strategies of Research
The events of September 11th bring urgency to problems of urban security, both in terms of finding ways to protect cities from attacks by terrorists and also protecting urban life from repressive measures that form in reaction to those attacks. We outline a rationale for urbanists to participate in analysis and policy-formulation on security issues and examine the utility of past urban research strategies, including criminology, in terms of their…
Things at Work: Informal social-material mechanisms for getting the job done
Through interviews and field observations, we examine how New York subway workers consume official workplace equipment, particularly how they informally deploy such artifacts towards individual and collective ends. We discuss the ways workers call on artifacts to manage routine concerns of work contexts — physical vulnerabilities, bureaucratic constraints, and difficult persons amongst them. We show how sustained attention to a public infrastruct…
Free to those who can afford it: The everyday affordance of privilege
America Identified: Biometric Technology and Society
The horizons of technological control: Automated surveillance in the New York subway
Surveillance technologies may be capable of monitoring a domain, but they need a sufficiently orderly domain to monitor. This article examines the secretive effort to institute artificial-intelligence-based 'smart surveillance' in the New York subway, using object- and pattern-recognition algorithms to identify dangerous activities in video feeds, such as a person abandoning a package. By considering the necessary preconditions for computer visio…
Virtuality and Offense in a Crime Scene of Technology
Can projections of technology, constituting virtual worlds, make our actions criminal? This article examines the interpretation of human action jointly with and through its technological context in ways that frame human criminality. I draw from a case of the criminalization of devices used for a “hustle” of the urban poor in the New York City subway. The case demonstrates how people can unwittingly be made into avatars said to act with purpose an…
Caught inside the black box: Criminalization, opaque technology, and the New York subway MetroCard
This article investigates how an account of hidden, internal properties of an everyday technology became a framework to interpret human action as a serious crime. Using a case study situated in the New York subway system, I examine the criminalization of a practice of New York’s poor known as “selling swipes” performed by so-called “swipers”. A high court came to classify the practice as felony forgery, interpreting it though an expert-witness ac…
Global perspectives on digital inequalities and solutions to them
In this special issue of First Monday, Global perspectives on digital inequalities and solutions to them we bring together scholars from five continents to offer a vista of the field of digital inequalities at the close of the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” We have chosen First Monday to publish our scholarship thanks to the foundational work in open access publishing by Edward J. Valauskas, Chief Editor and Founder. First Monday’s app…
Digital inequalities in time of pandemic: Covid-19 exposure risk profiles and new forms of vulnerability
In this article, we argue that new kinds of risk are emerging with the COVID-19 virus, and that these risks are unequally distributed. As we expose to view, digital inequalities and social inequalities are rendering certain subgroups significantly more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19. Vulnerable populations bearing disproportionate risks include the social isolated, older adults, penal system subjects, digitally disadvantaged students, gig wor…
Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control
Cascading Crises: Society in the Age of Covid-19
The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic-unlike other crises-have impacted almost every facet of our l…
Meming the Catch-22: Doing security where the steel wheel hits the rail
While Internet memes are often treated as artifacts which play with broad cultural elements, they can also take on distinctive meanings within narrow communities of practice or organizational membership. This article demonstrates how interrogating a certain interpretation of a meme, and a sort of humor found within it, can reveal elements of viewers’ situated experience. In other words, I argue that when we get a joke, we begin to understand a wo…
Introduction: Meditating crisis: Covid-19 and beyond
This paper provides a summary of content in this special issue
The Death-Based Model of Organizational Learning: Accident, Pandemic, and Workplace Change in New York Public Transit
The public transportation workers of New York City lost their lives to COVID-19 at a shocking rate in the spring of 2020, likely abetted by their employer's resistance to allow workers to wear masks until mere days before a region-wide lockdown was declared. We might see this death toll as a tragic outcome of uncertainty in the face of the unprecedented, yet the stance of the employer (the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA) was consis…
Theories and Politics of Covid-19
This issue brings theoretically driven analyses to bear on the COVID-19 pandemic, a development which shines a singularly revealing light on some of the most significant political, cultural, and social trends of the 21st century. Leading off with three explicitly theoretical treatments of the pandemic, this issue directs several complementary lenses at the early stages of the pandemic as it unfolded in the US and Europe. The initial contributions…
Gig Work, Telework, Precarity, and the Pandemic
This issue examines technology-driven economic developments during the global COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Specifically, the articles cover the ways that gig work, the platform economy, and remote work have evolved during the course of the pandemic. The issue leads with articles that chart the interplay of the platform economy with various facets of the pandemic from the inequalities and risks faced by gig workers to marke…
Prison, Material-Organizational Bricolage, and Precarious Frameworks of Normality in an Era of Disruption
Prison scholars have long noted prisoners' improvisation with materials and resources at hand (or bricolage) in ways that defy the prison regime. Yet longstanding scholarly perspectives which cite such bricolage as evidence for themes like "prison culture" or "resistance" have often distracted scholars from accounting for the specific features of organizational materials and operations that prisoners leverage in their bricolage, and distracted fr…
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Computer security (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Criminology (5 works) · Medicine (5 works) · Pandemic (5 works) · Public relations (5 works)