Morgan Currie
Biographic Data
| ID | 297950 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Morgan Currie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Morgan |
| FAMILY NAME | Currie |
| SIGNATURE | CURRIE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4569-7190 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 272 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Automating universal credit: A case of temporal governance
In this paper we study the dimension of time in social security, namely, the requirement of claimants to adopt a particular temporality in return for entitlements. We focus on the temporal rules and mandates of Universal Credit (UC), a unified benefit in the United Kingdom that delivers payment to claimants through a dynamic, automated means-testing system. UC imposes temporality through a monthly assessment period, a unit of time that UC has mad…
Governance by Infrastructure (Part II): Preface
This collection of articles is the second part of the special issue published by First Monday in February 2024 (https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/747). The original thematic series of case studies on ‘Governance by Infrastructure’ is extended here with three new case studies, an article on methodology, and a closing commentary. Their publication concludes an adventure that we began in 2021 with the preparation of a workshop held…
Universal Credit: Administrative Burdens of Automated Welfare
Since 2010, the UK government has transformed social security administration using digital technology and automated instruments to create and deliver a single working-age benefit known as Universal Credit (UC). Social policy scholars have given much attention to the key policy tenets of UC but engaged less with leading aspects of automated and digital delivery and their relationship to different forms of administrative burdens for UC recipients. …
Chapter 1 Predictive Policing: Transforming the City Into a Medium for Control
Chapter 11 the Street, the Square and the Net: How Urban Activists Make and Use Networked Technologies
Urban activists all over the world wrestle with the need for -and limitations of -digital communications and data storage -often with rather creative and hopeful results. This chapter outlines these struggles through ethnographies of activist groups in the United States, European Union (EU) and Middle East and North Africa regions, through a values-in-design analysis of their tools. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with progressi…
Introduction: Data Justice and the Right to the City
This chapter argues that the concept of data justice can inform and enrich practices motivated by the Right to the City (RTTC). RTTC is, at heart, a radical concept of citizenship that calls for the collective design of urban life, of 'affordable housing, a decent school for the kids, accessible services, reliable public transport. The right to have your urban horizon as wide or as narrow as you want' (Merrifield 2017). The comparatively nascent …
Chapter 14 Data Resistance Through Public Art: Reclaiming Narratives in/of the City
Chapter 12 Facial Recognition and the Right to Appear: Infrastructural Challenges in Anti-Surveillance Resistance
Now that they are preparing the way for the automation of perception, for the innovation of artificial vision, delegating the analysis of objective reality to a machine, it might be appropriate to have another look at the nature of the virtual image. This is the formation of optical imagery with no apparent base, no permanency beyond that of mental or instrumental visual memory. Today it is impossible to talk about the development of the audio-vi…
Chapter 2 ‘Hostile Data’, Migration and the City: Enacting and Resisting Spaces of Hostility in the Uk
Chapter 13 Data Burdens: Epistemologies of Evidence in Police Reform and Abolition Movements
In the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin widened an already old and painful rift around systemic inequality grounded in racism, made more pronounced by the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 Prior to Floyd's murder, racial health disparities put people of colour at 5.3 times the risk for contracting and suffering acute complications from the COVID-19 pandemic than whites (CDC 2020). Even as pandemic conditio…
Chapter 4 Seven Stories From Algorithmwatch
Chapter 3 Datafied Child Welfare Services as Sites of Struggle
Predictive analytics is increasingly being used by child welfare agencies in many countries to influence decisions about resources, services, risk, and when and how to intervene in the lives of families. This chapter draws on international case study investigations of government agencies that have tried and cancelled their plans to pursue the use of predictive analytics to inform decisions about families and services. The chapter makes the case t…
Data Justice and the Right to the City
Explores of social justice, citizenship, and community in the context of data-driven urbanism Investigates critical issues of social justice, citizenship and community in the context of the powerful economic rationales of data-driven urban development Makes a theoretical contribution towards framing social justice from the perspective of the datafied city Documents new case studies and exposes new avenues for research across social justice, criti…
Surveillance, Discretion and Governance in Automated Welfare: The Case of the German Allegro System
Several scholarly studies and journalistic investigations have found that automated decision-making in welfare systems burdens claimants by forecasting their behaviour, targeting them for sanctions and surveillance and punishing them without revealing the underlying mechanisms driving such decisions. This article develops an analytical framework combining three areas of concern regarding automation: how it might introduce surveillance and social …
Searching for the Forgotten: Examining the Online Presence of Victims of Police Killings
This paper examines the potential role of social media in enhancing the understanding and perception of victims of police killings and the data collection surrounding these incidents. Through a series of content analysis and social media mining exercises, the authors observe the emergence of three distinct types of social media content offered on victims of police killings: persistence of the deceased’s activity across social media, sensational c…
Tangibles, intangibles and other tensions in the Culture and Communities Mapping Project
This paper describes the Culture and Communities Mapping Project, a study that uses cultural mapping to understand the relationships between the Edinburgh’s cultural spaces and local communities. The paper begins by detailing different methodological paths that those carrying out cultural mapping projects will navigate: formatting the project to collect quantitative or qualitative data, which is usually correlated with tangible or intangible data…
Numbers will not save us: Agonistic data practices
Contemporary forms of data activism promise community organizers the means to pursue political action, but they simultaneously threaten to responsibilize individuals and communities for documenting collective harms that are already known to the state. In this article, we use Mouffe’s articulation of agonistic pluralism to analyze recent literature on data activism in terms of this double bind, the threat that authentic community voice might be mu…
Data as performance - Showcasing cities through open data maps
This article describes how the City of Los Angeles is showcasing data-driven services to the public through dynamic visualisations of open data. I frame an analysis of this aspect of datafication in local government through linguistics and cultural theory; drawing on this set of literature I theorise the use of public data as both a performative tool and a performance of data-driven city services. I then discuss examples of interactive maps on th…
Performative Data: Cultures of Government Data Practice
Most of the current academic literature on open data looks outward at the data's reuse by the public. This article describes, rather, the cultural practice of open data inside city governments. Hand-in-hand with the launch of open data policies, city governments have embraced data analytics to track performance, set goals, justify budget expenditures, direct public services, and represent their work to the public. Through an increased need to dat…
The conundrum of police officer-involved homicides: Counter-data in Los Angeles County
This paper draws from critical data studies and related fields to investigate police officer-involved homicide data for Los Angeles County. We frame police officer-involved homicide data as a rhetorical tool that can reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power. We highlight the possibility that this type of sensitive civic data can be investigated and employed within local communities through creative practice. Community…
Data Justice and the Right to the City
Explores of social justice, citizenship, and community in the context of data-driven urbanism Investigates critical issues of social justice, citizenship and community in the context of the powerful economic rationales of data-driven urban development Makes a theoretical contribution towards framing social justice from the perspective of the datafied city Documents new case studies and exposes new avenues for research across social justice, criti…
The conundrum of police officer-involved homicides: Counter-data in Los Angeles County
This paper draws from critical data studies and related fields to investigate police officer-involved homicide data for Los Angeles County. We frame police officer-involved homicide data as a rhetorical tool that can reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power. We highlight the possibility that this type of sensitive civic data can be investigated and employed within local communities through creative practice. Community…
Numbers will not save us: Agonistic data practices
Contemporary forms of data activism promise community organizers the means to pursue political action, but they simultaneously threaten to responsibilize individuals and communities for documenting collective harms that are already known to the state. In this article, we use Mouffe’s articulation of agonistic pluralism to analyze recent literature on data activism in terms of this double bind, the threat that authentic community voice might be mu…
Data as performance - Showcasing cities through open data maps
This article describes how the City of Los Angeles is showcasing data-driven services to the public through dynamic visualisations of open data. I frame an analysis of this aspect of datafication in local government through linguistics and cultural theory; drawing on this set of literature I theorise the use of public data as both a performative tool and a performance of data-driven city services. I then discuss examples of interactive maps on th…
Universal Credit: Administrative Burdens of Automated Welfare
Since 2010, the UK government has transformed social security administration using digital technology and automated instruments to create and deliver a single working-age benefit known as Universal Credit (UC). Social policy scholars have given much attention to the key policy tenets of UC but engaged less with leading aspects of automated and digital delivery and their relationship to different forms of administrative burdens for UC recipients. …
The conundrum of police officer-involved homicides: Counter-data in Los Angeles County
This paper draws from critical data studies and related fields to investigate police officer-involved homicide data for Los Angeles County. We frame police officer-involved homicide data as a rhetorical tool that can reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power. We highlight the possibility that this type of sensitive civic data can be investigated and employed within local communities through creative practice. Community…
Performative Data: Cultures of Government Data Practice
Most of the current academic literature on open data looks outward at the data's reuse by the public. This article describes, rather, the cultural practice of open data inside city governments. Hand-in-hand with the launch of open data policies, city governments have embraced data analytics to track performance, set goals, justify budget expenditures, direct public services, and represent their work to the public. Through an increased need to dat…
Data as performance - Showcasing cities through open data maps
This article describes how the City of Los Angeles is showcasing data-driven services to the public through dynamic visualisations of open data. I frame an analysis of this aspect of datafication in local government through linguistics and cultural theory; drawing on this set of literature I theorise the use of public data as both a performative tool and a performance of data-driven city services. I then discuss examples of interactive maps on th…
Searching for the Forgotten: Examining the Online Presence of Victims of Police Killings
This paper examines the potential role of social media in enhancing the understanding and perception of victims of police killings and the data collection surrounding these incidents. Through a series of content analysis and social media mining exercises, the authors observe the emergence of three distinct types of social media content offered on victims of police killings: persistence of the deceased’s activity across social media, sensational c…
Tangibles, intangibles and other tensions in the Culture and Communities Mapping Project
This paper describes the Culture and Communities Mapping Project, a study that uses cultural mapping to understand the relationships between the Edinburgh’s cultural spaces and local communities. The paper begins by detailing different methodological paths that those carrying out cultural mapping projects will navigate: formatting the project to collect quantitative or qualitative data, which is usually correlated with tangible or intangible data…
Numbers will not save us: Agonistic data practices
Contemporary forms of data activism promise community organizers the means to pursue political action, but they simultaneously threaten to responsibilize individuals and communities for documenting collective harms that are already known to the state. In this article, we use Mouffe’s articulation of agonistic pluralism to analyze recent literature on data activism in terms of this double bind, the threat that authentic community voice might be mu…
Chapter 1 Predictive Policing: Transforming the City Into a Medium for Control
Chapter 11 the Street, the Square and the Net: How Urban Activists Make and Use Networked Technologies
Urban activists all over the world wrestle with the need for -and limitations of -digital communications and data storage -often with rather creative and hopeful results. This chapter outlines these struggles through ethnographies of activist groups in the United States, European Union (EU) and Middle East and North Africa regions, through a values-in-design analysis of their tools. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with progressi…
Introduction: Data Justice and the Right to the City
This chapter argues that the concept of data justice can inform and enrich practices motivated by the Right to the City (RTTC). RTTC is, at heart, a radical concept of citizenship that calls for the collective design of urban life, of 'affordable housing, a decent school for the kids, accessible services, reliable public transport. The right to have your urban horizon as wide or as narrow as you want' (Merrifield 2017). The comparatively nascent …
Chapter 14 Data Resistance Through Public Art: Reclaiming Narratives in/of the City
Chapter 12 Facial Recognition and the Right to Appear: Infrastructural Challenges in Anti-Surveillance Resistance
Now that they are preparing the way for the automation of perception, for the innovation of artificial vision, delegating the analysis of objective reality to a machine, it might be appropriate to have another look at the nature of the virtual image. This is the formation of optical imagery with no apparent base, no permanency beyond that of mental or instrumental visual memory. Today it is impossible to talk about the development of the audio-vi…
Chapter 2 ‘Hostile Data’, Migration and the City: Enacting and Resisting Spaces of Hostility in the Uk
Chapter 13 Data Burdens: Epistemologies of Evidence in Police Reform and Abolition Movements
In the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin widened an already old and painful rift around systemic inequality grounded in racism, made more pronounced by the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 Prior to Floyd's murder, racial health disparities put people of colour at 5.3 times the risk for contracting and suffering acute complications from the COVID-19 pandemic than whites (CDC 2020). Even as pandemic conditio…
Chapter 4 Seven Stories From Algorithmwatch
Chapter 3 Datafied Child Welfare Services as Sites of Struggle
Predictive analytics is increasingly being used by child welfare agencies in many countries to influence decisions about resources, services, risk, and when and how to intervene in the lives of families. This chapter draws on international case study investigations of government agencies that have tried and cancelled their plans to pursue the use of predictive analytics to inform decisions about families and services. The chapter makes the case t…
Data Justice and the Right to the City
Explores of social justice, citizenship, and community in the context of data-driven urbanism Investigates critical issues of social justice, citizenship and community in the context of the powerful economic rationales of data-driven urban development Makes a theoretical contribution towards framing social justice from the perspective of the datafied city Documents new case studies and exposes new avenues for research across social justice, criti…
Surveillance, Discretion and Governance in Automated Welfare: The Case of the German Allegro System
Several scholarly studies and journalistic investigations have found that automated decision-making in welfare systems burdens claimants by forecasting their behaviour, targeting them for sanctions and surveillance and punishing them without revealing the underlying mechanisms driving such decisions. This article develops an analytical framework combining three areas of concern regarding automation: how it might introduce surveillance and social …
Automating universal credit: A case of temporal governance
In this paper we study the dimension of time in social security, namely, the requirement of claimants to adopt a particular temporality in return for entitlements. We focus on the temporal rules and mandates of Universal Credit (UC), a unified benefit in the United Kingdom that delivers payment to claimants through a dynamic, automated means-testing system. UC imposes temporality through a monthly assessment period, a unit of time that UC has mad…
Governance by Infrastructure (Part II): Preface
This collection of articles is the second part of the special issue published by First Monday in February 2024 (https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/747). The original thematic series of case studies on ‘Governance by Infrastructure’ is extended here with three new case studies, an article on methodology, and a closing commentary. Their publication concludes an adventure that we began in 2021 with the preparation of a workshop held…
Universal Credit: Administrative Burdens of Automated Welfare
Since 2010, the UK government has transformed social security administration using digital technology and automated instruments to create and deliver a single working-age benefit known as Universal Credit (UC). Social policy scholars have given much attention to the key policy tenets of UC but engaged less with leading aspects of automated and digital delivery and their relationship to different forms of administrative burdens for UC recipients. …
Computer Science (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Public relations (5 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Art (3 works) · Corporate governance (3 works) · Criminology (3 works)