Alison B Powell
Biographic Data
| ID | 2744940 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alison B Powell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alison B |
| FAMILY NAME | Powell |
| SIGNATURE | POWELL A B |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5780-9132 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Unwieldy urban knowledges
The prospect of knowing feels tantalizing. The secret of eternal life – the universal language; the real truth – all seem promising, even though many ancient stories also warn against the hubris associated with wishing to know too much. Understood in this way, the very prospect of knowing becomes ambivalent. How much knowing is too much? Which knowledge? For whom, and how? What happens when the processes of attempting to know become unwieldy, or …
Big Data Discourses| Deceptive Stories About Scale: Digital Technology, Public Services, and the Promise of Efficiency
“Blitzscaling”—the language and practice of rapidly scaling technology companies—can have significant consequences when pursued in public service delivery. From 2016 until it went bankrupt in 2023, health-tech start-up Babylon Health introduced discourses and practices of scaling to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). While the company promised that its software and Artificial Intelligence (AI) would create efficiency, automated d…
Objectivity vs affect: How competing forms of legitimacy can polarize public debate in data-driven public consultation
How do data and objectivity become politicized? How do processes intended to include citizen voices instead push them into social media that intensify negative expression? This paper examines the possibility and limits of 'agonistic data practices' (Crooks & Currie, 2021) examining how data-driven consultation practices create competing forms of legitimacy for quantifiable knowledge and affective lived experience. Drawing on a two-year study of a…
Heat work: Choreography as an ecological enquiry of machine learning and extractivism
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to both disrupt and transform the performing arts. However, the use of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in choreography risks leading to a reductive and opaque formalization of choreographic decisions, often disregarding energy consumption and environmental impact. This article explores choreography as a method for examining the energetic materialities of ML and extractivism. Through Heat Work, a per…
Four Ways to Feminist Research Praxis: Lessons from Practice in AI Ethics and Policy Research
Background: The last five years have been dizzying for anyone concerned with AI policymaking and regulation. This briefing describes four ways to enact feminist research praxis in technology policy research. Analysis: Drawing on lessons from the JUST AI Network in the United Kingdom and insights from both feminist and disability studies, this study critiques and redevelops relationships between discourse, knowledge, and institutional structures. …
Addressing ethical gaps in 'Technology for Good: Foregrounding care and capabilities
This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in 'technology for good' development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among 'technology for good' start-ups. The paper identifies inherent paradoxes in the 'technology for good' sector a…
Explanations as governance? Investigating practices of explanation in algorithmic system design
The algorithms underpinning many everyday communication processes are now complex enough that rendering them explainable has become a key governance objective. This article examines the question of 'who should be required to explain what, to whom, in platform environments'. By working with algorithm designers and using design methods to extrapolate existing capacities to explain aglorithmic functioning, the article discusses the power relationshi…
Book notes: Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities
Engaging with ethics in Internet of Things: Imaginaries in the social milieu of technology developers
Discussions about ethics of Big Data often focus on the ethics of data processing: collecting, storing, handling, analysing and sharing data. Data-based systems, however, do not come from nowhere. They are designed and brought into being within social spaces - or social milieu. This paper connects philosophical considerations of individual and collective capacity to enact practical reason to the influence of social spaces. Building a deeper engag…
Moral Orders in Contribution Cultures
This article examines how decisions are made and justified within cultures of contribution using an “operational pragmatics.” Peer-production and contribution cultures are enfolded in a dynamic of resistance and appropriation in relation to capitalism. Open-source and contribution-based cultural processes have been critiqued as tending towards bureaucracy or becoming enfolded in a never-ending neoliberal imaginary from which escape or transcenden…
Turning Words Into Consumer Preferences: How Sentiment Analysis Is Framed in Research and the News Media
Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular instrument for the analysis of social media discourse. Sentiment scores seemingly represent an objective means of assessing the mood of social media users, consumers, and the public at large. Similar to other computational tools, sentiment analysis promises to reduce complexity and mitigate information overload, and to inform the decisions of marketers, pollsters, and scholars with reliable data. This…
Network exceptionalism: Online action, discourse and the opposition to Sopa and Acta
Advocacy campaigns opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) illustrate that the dynamics of networked activism have symbolic as well as structural aspects, with implications for scholars and activists who have focused on the coordination possibilities of networks. This paper analyses the creation and movement of discourses of ‘network exceptionalism’ between advocates, online culture and news media. N…
Hacking in the public interest: Authority, legitimacy, means, and ends
The cultural appropriation of ideas about hacking and opening knowledge have had significant impact on ways of developing participation in creating public interest knowledge and knowledge commons. In particular, the ideal of hacking as developed through studies of free and open source (F/OS) has highlighted the value of processes of participation, including participatory governance, in relation to the value of expanded accessibility of knowledge,…
Open culture and innovation: Integrating knowledge across boundaries
What does open source mean for culture? For knowledge? As cultural production has come to be characterized by contribution as well as consumption and as alternative modes of intellectual property transfer challenge the ‘dominant paradigm’ that knowledge and information should be protected and monetized, the logic of ‘open sourcing’ has extended into many cultural spheres. This article positions ‘openness’ as a value that intermediates between re-…
Big Data from the bottom up
This short article argues that an adequate response to the implications for governance raised by 'Big Data' requires much more attention to agency and reflexivity than theories of 'algorithmic power' have so far allowed. It develops this through two contrasting examples: the sociological study of social actors used of analytics to meet their own social ends (for example, by community organisations) and the study of actors' attempts to build an ec…
Democratizing production through open source knowledge: From open software to open hardware
The commercial success of open source software, along with a broader socio-cultural shift towards participation in media and cultural production, have inspired attempts to extend and expand open source practices. These include expansions from software into general culture through ‘Free Culture’ movements and, more recently, expansions from software into hardware and design. This article provides a critical perspective on the democratic potential …
Flyover Country
Flyover Country Alison Powell (bio) We would fly over it if we could, sure enough:thick nights perched up high on the barn's tin roof,smoking, we want to be the swallows sailing overthe wheat, refuse, the cul-de-sacs and deer carcasses. Instead we pass secrets, then shame within uslike shared liquor from corn, from moon, and thenwe sneak back home, slide pond-wet into the coop-rubbingthe screen door hinges with spit to make them silent. We know o…
Metaphors for Democratic Communication Spaces: How Developers of Local Wireless Networks Frame Technology and Urban Space
Communications policies, like many other social policies, are founded on an ideal of democracy that connects the development of communication infrastructures with democratic public spheres. This framing is a constructivist endeavour that takes place through language, institution, and infrastructure. Projects that aim to develop these capacities must grapple with the way such new media technologies are integrated into existing contexts or spaces, …
Net Neutrality Discourses: Comparing Advocacy and Regulatory Arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom
Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce “Net neutrality” regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those …
Reforming Policy to Promote Local Broadband Networks
Most existing assessments of local Wi-Fi projects have concentrated on either top-down, government-driven endeavors, or bottom-up projects developed by volunteers or community organizations. In both Canada and the United States, existing local Wi-Fi projects—both top down and bottom up—have failed to fulfill expectations that they could increase digital inclusion. Current policy frameworks may play some role in these failures. This article argues…
Wifi Publics: Producing community and technology
Drawing on community expertise, open-source software and non-hierarchical organizational strategies, community wireless networks (CWN) engage volunteers in building networks for public internet access and community media. Volunteers intend these networks to be used to reinvigorate local community. Together the following two purposes create two distinct mediated publics: to engage volunteers in discussing and undertaking technical innovations, and…
Big Data from the bottom up
This short article argues that an adequate response to the implications for governance raised by 'Big Data' requires much more attention to agency and reflexivity than theories of 'algorithmic power' have so far allowed. It develops this through two contrasting examples: the sociological study of social actors used of analytics to meet their own social ends (for example, by community organisations) and the study of actors' attempts to build an ec…
Hacking in the public interest: Authority, legitimacy, means, and ends
The cultural appropriation of ideas about hacking and opening knowledge have had significant impact on ways of developing participation in creating public interest knowledge and knowledge commons. In particular, the ideal of hacking as developed through studies of free and open source (F/OS) has highlighted the value of processes of participation, including participatory governance, in relation to the value of expanded accessibility of knowledge,…
Democratizing production through open source knowledge: From open software to open hardware
The commercial success of open source software, along with a broader socio-cultural shift towards participation in media and cultural production, have inspired attempts to extend and expand open source practices. These include expansions from software into general culture through ‘Free Culture’ movements and, more recently, expansions from software into hardware and design. This article provides a critical perspective on the democratic potential …
Engaging with ethics in Internet of Things: Imaginaries in the social milieu of technology developers
Discussions about ethics of Big Data often focus on the ethics of data processing: collecting, storing, handling, analysing and sharing data. Data-based systems, however, do not come from nowhere. They are designed and brought into being within social spaces - or social milieu. This paper connects philosophical considerations of individual and collective capacity to enact practical reason to the influence of social spaces. Building a deeper engag…
Turning Words Into Consumer Preferences: How Sentiment Analysis Is Framed in Research and the News Media
Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular instrument for the analysis of social media discourse. Sentiment scores seemingly represent an objective means of assessing the mood of social media users, consumers, and the public at large. Similar to other computational tools, sentiment analysis promises to reduce complexity and mitigate information overload, and to inform the decisions of marketers, pollsters, and scholars with reliable data. This…
Addressing ethical gaps in 'Technology for Good: Foregrounding care and capabilities
This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in 'technology for good' development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among 'technology for good' start-ups. The paper identifies inherent paradoxes in the 'technology for good' sector a…
Moral Orders in Contribution Cultures
This article examines how decisions are made and justified within cultures of contribution using an “operational pragmatics.” Peer-production and contribution cultures are enfolded in a dynamic of resistance and appropriation in relation to capitalism. Open-source and contribution-based cultural processes have been critiqued as tending towards bureaucracy or becoming enfolded in a never-ending neoliberal imaginary from which escape or transcenden…
Four Ways to Feminist Research Praxis: Lessons from Practice in AI Ethics and Policy Research
Background: The last five years have been dizzying for anyone concerned with AI policymaking and regulation. This briefing describes four ways to enact feminist research praxis in technology policy research. Analysis: Drawing on lessons from the JUST AI Network in the United Kingdom and insights from both feminist and disability studies, this study critiques and redevelops relationships between discourse, knowledge, and institutional structures. …
Net Neutrality Discourses: Comparing Advocacy and Regulatory Arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom
Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce “Net neutrality” regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those …
Wifi Publics: Producing community and technology
Drawing on community expertise, open-source software and non-hierarchical organizational strategies, community wireless networks (CWN) engage volunteers in building networks for public internet access and community media. Volunteers intend these networks to be used to reinvigorate local community. Together the following two purposes create two distinct mediated publics: to engage volunteers in discussing and undertaking technical innovations, and…
Reforming Policy to Promote Local Broadband Networks
Most existing assessments of local Wi-Fi projects have concentrated on either top-down, government-driven endeavors, or bottom-up projects developed by volunteers or community organizations. In both Canada and the United States, existing local Wi-Fi projects—both top down and bottom up—have failed to fulfill expectations that they could increase digital inclusion. Current policy frameworks may play some role in these failures. This article argues…
Metaphors for Democratic Communication Spaces: How Developers of Local Wireless Networks Frame Technology and Urban Space
Communications policies, like many other social policies, are founded on an ideal of democracy that connects the development of communication infrastructures with democratic public spheres. This framing is a constructivist endeavour that takes place through language, institution, and infrastructure. Projects that aim to develop these capacities must grapple with the way such new media technologies are integrated into existing contexts or spaces, …
Net Neutrality Discourses: Comparing Advocacy and Regulatory Arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom
Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce “Net neutrality” regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those …
Democratizing production through open source knowledge: From open software to open hardware
The commercial success of open source software, along with a broader socio-cultural shift towards participation in media and cultural production, have inspired attempts to extend and expand open source practices. These include expansions from software into general culture through ‘Free Culture’ movements and, more recently, expansions from software into hardware and design. This article provides a critical perspective on the democratic potential …
Flyover Country
Flyover Country Alison Powell (bio) We would fly over it if we could, sure enough:thick nights perched up high on the barn's tin roof,smoking, we want to be the swallows sailing overthe wheat, refuse, the cul-de-sacs and deer carcasses. Instead we pass secrets, then shame within uslike shared liquor from corn, from moon, and thenwe sneak back home, slide pond-wet into the coop-rubbingthe screen door hinges with spit to make them silent. We know o…
Big Data from the bottom up
This short article argues that an adequate response to the implications for governance raised by 'Big Data' requires much more attention to agency and reflexivity than theories of 'algorithmic power' have so far allowed. It develops this through two contrasting examples: the sociological study of social actors used of analytics to meet their own social ends (for example, by community organisations) and the study of actors' attempts to build an ec…
Open culture and innovation: Integrating knowledge across boundaries
What does open source mean for culture? For knowledge? As cultural production has come to be characterized by contribution as well as consumption and as alternative modes of intellectual property transfer challenge the ‘dominant paradigm’ that knowledge and information should be protected and monetized, the logic of ‘open sourcing’ has extended into many cultural spheres. This article positions ‘openness’ as a value that intermediates between re-…
Network exceptionalism: Online action, discourse and the opposition to Sopa and Acta
Advocacy campaigns opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) illustrate that the dynamics of networked activism have symbolic as well as structural aspects, with implications for scholars and activists who have focused on the coordination possibilities of networks. This paper analyses the creation and movement of discourses of ‘network exceptionalism’ between advocates, online culture and news media. N…
Hacking in the public interest: Authority, legitimacy, means, and ends
The cultural appropriation of ideas about hacking and opening knowledge have had significant impact on ways of developing participation in creating public interest knowledge and knowledge commons. In particular, the ideal of hacking as developed through studies of free and open source (F/OS) has highlighted the value of processes of participation, including participatory governance, in relation to the value of expanded accessibility of knowledge,…
Moral Orders in Contribution Cultures
This article examines how decisions are made and justified within cultures of contribution using an “operational pragmatics.” Peer-production and contribution cultures are enfolded in a dynamic of resistance and appropriation in relation to capitalism. Open-source and contribution-based cultural processes have been critiqued as tending towards bureaucracy or becoming enfolded in a never-ending neoliberal imaginary from which escape or transcenden…
Turning Words Into Consumer Preferences: How Sentiment Analysis Is Framed in Research and the News Media
Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular instrument for the analysis of social media discourse. Sentiment scores seemingly represent an objective means of assessing the mood of social media users, consumers, and the public at large. Similar to other computational tools, sentiment analysis promises to reduce complexity and mitigate information overload, and to inform the decisions of marketers, pollsters, and scholars with reliable data. This…
Engaging with ethics in Internet of Things: Imaginaries in the social milieu of technology developers
Discussions about ethics of Big Data often focus on the ethics of data processing: collecting, storing, handling, analysing and sharing data. Data-based systems, however, do not come from nowhere. They are designed and brought into being within social spaces - or social milieu. This paper connects philosophical considerations of individual and collective capacity to enact practical reason to the influence of social spaces. Building a deeper engag…
Explanations as governance? Investigating practices of explanation in algorithmic system design
The algorithms underpinning many everyday communication processes are now complex enough that rendering them explainable has become a key governance objective. This article examines the question of 'who should be required to explain what, to whom, in platform environments'. By working with algorithm designers and using design methods to extrapolate existing capacities to explain aglorithmic functioning, the article discusses the power relationshi…
Book notes: Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities
Addressing ethical gaps in 'Technology for Good: Foregrounding care and capabilities
This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in 'technology for good' development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among 'technology for good' start-ups. The paper identifies inherent paradoxes in the 'technology for good' sector a…
Objectivity vs affect: How competing forms of legitimacy can polarize public debate in data-driven public consultation
How do data and objectivity become politicized? How do processes intended to include citizen voices instead push them into social media that intensify negative expression? This paper examines the possibility and limits of 'agonistic data practices' (Crooks & Currie, 2021) examining how data-driven consultation practices create competing forms of legitimacy for quantifiable knowledge and affective lived experience. Drawing on a two-year study of a…
Heat work: Choreography as an ecological enquiry of machine learning and extractivism
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to both disrupt and transform the performing arts. However, the use of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in choreography risks leading to a reductive and opaque formalization of choreographic decisions, often disregarding energy consumption and environmental impact. This article explores choreography as a method for examining the energetic materialities of ML and extractivism. Through Heat Work, a per…
Four Ways to Feminist Research Praxis: Lessons from Practice in AI Ethics and Policy Research
Background: The last five years have been dizzying for anyone concerned with AI policymaking and regulation. This briefing describes four ways to enact feminist research praxis in technology policy research. Analysis: Drawing on lessons from the JUST AI Network in the United Kingdom and insights from both feminist and disability studies, this study critiques and redevelops relationships between discourse, knowledge, and institutional structures. …
Unwieldy urban knowledges
The prospect of knowing feels tantalizing. The secret of eternal life – the universal language; the real truth – all seem promising, even though many ancient stories also warn against the hubris associated with wishing to know too much. Understood in this way, the very prospect of knowing becomes ambivalent. How much knowing is too much? Which knowledge? For whom, and how? What happens when the processes of attempting to know become unwieldy, or …
Big Data Discourses| Deceptive Stories About Scale: Digital Technology, Public Services, and the Promise of Efficiency
“Blitzscaling”—the language and practice of rapidly scaling technology companies—can have significant consequences when pursued in public service delivery. From 2016 until it went bankrupt in 2023, health-tech start-up Babylon Health introduced discourses and practices of scaling to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). While the company promised that its software and Artificial Intelligence (AI) would create efficiency, automated d…
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Public relations (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (6 works) · Social Media and Politics (6 works)