William L Allen
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 373292 |
|---|---|
| NOME | William L Allen |
| PRENOMES | William L |
| SOBRENOME | Allen |
| ASSINATURA | ALLEN W L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3185-1468 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 186 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1971 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Beyond skills
Research on public attitudes toward immigration consistently shows that people prefer higher- over lower-skilled immigrants, largely for sociotropic economic and fiscal reasons. We argue that this account is incomplete: citizens also evaluate immigrant workers according to the essentiality and social value of the work they perform, alongside formal skills and education. We conceptualize two logics for evaluating occupations – economic-fiscal and …
Imagined Integration
As governments develop immigrant integration policies, they draw on and express conceptions about what successful integration looks like—what we call “imagined integration.” Yet this imagination likely displays variation that matters for implementation: integration policymaking is increasingly multilevel as it involves subnational layers of bureaucracy, and it may differ across national contexts which have distinct immigration experiences and pol…
Worst of the Bunch
Benchmarking theories argue voters use information about other countries’ performances, usually on the economy and obtained through experience or media, to evaluate their own governments. Yet existing observational evidence is relatively fragile and struggles to distinguish how people become more knowledgeable. Using a pre-registered experiment, we showed UK respondents a chart displaying the UK’s exceptionally high cumulative COVID-19 deaths eit…
Beyond symbolism
How do city-level policymakers build support for substantive action in policy domains characterized by low levels of national salience and limited local capacity, and which evidentiary resources support as well as reflect these uses? Despite much attention to policymakers’ engagement with evidence, existing work tends to focus on domains where the issues at stake attract high levels of input and influence from central governments. This limits emp…
Communicating Economic Evidence About Immigration Changes Attitudes and Policy Preferences
Existing studies demonstrate that threat perceptions matter for immigration attitudes. However, while these perceptions are potentially sensitive to information about immigrants’ impacts, questions remain about whether inserting such information into public debates changes attitudes and policy preferences—especially on polarizing issues like immigration. Moreover, few studies have considered messages featuring the type of nonphotorealistic visual…
Visual bordering
Theories of symbolic bordering highlight how xenophobic media coverage and humanitarian messaging create boundaries between migrants and receiving communities partly based on deservingness. Contrasting with studies of mainly text-based representations of refugees, we examine refugee-serving organizations’ visual communications work on Instagram. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, we collected 191 posts made in early 2021 by …
Next slide please
How do governments visually communicate policies, and what does this reveal about actors’ political objectives? Governments strategically narrate their priorities, yet few studies examine this process through visual modes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understanding in policy studies by focusing on the UK government’s COVID-19 response through its daily press briefings during the first wave of 2020. Combining quantitative changepoint…
As We Like It
Rhetoric surrounding the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on continued European Union (EU) membership frequently has invoked the “will of the people.” Addressing the House of Commons in March 2019, then–Prime Minster Theresa May stated that “my sense of responsibility and duty has meant that I have kept working to ensure that we deliver on the result and the will of the people” (March 27, 2019). 1 May’s successor, Boris Johnson, appealed to the s…
Policy preferences in response to large forced migration inflows
What migration policies do people in receiving countries prefer, and to what extent do humanitarian concerns matter for these preferences? Despite sustained scholarly attention to migration attitudes in high-income countries, much less work examines public policy preferences—particularly in low- and middle-income countries that receive most forced migrants globally. While legislators can propose and implement migration policies involving multiple…
Shock Mobilities During Moments of Acute Uncertainty
The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how these reactions impact politics and societies. Specifically, we propose the concept of “shock mobility” as migratory routines radically reconfigured: emer…
The politics of data visualisation and policy making
Data visualisation has become ubiquitous in everyday life, from seeing images in news media to tracking individual health indicators. While the effects of data visualisation on society and people have been explored within a range of literature, there has been far less attention paid to the interconnectedness of data visualisation and policy making. In this special issue, we explore how data visualisation matters for policy priorities, processes a…
Combining Computational and Archival Methods to Study International Organizations
Researchers studying international organizations have access to growing and varied archives due to digitization efforts. While developments in computational methods confer efficiency gains for examining these materials at scale, they raise concerns about their validity when applied to interpretive tasks in historical settings. In response, we present a general and flexible workflow that uses simple computational techniques from linguistics to enh…
How universities facilitate city network socialization through knowledge exchange on immigrant integration
Universities increasingly facilitate as well as study social change alongside decision-makers and users. This is partly in response to demands for civic engagement and demonstrable public impact. While existing scholarship has critically examined these collaborations' impacts, less work addresses either how they develop or what benefits they confer to participants-especially those operating at local scales. By examining two university-initiated n…
The conventions and politics of migration data visualizations
What visual features characterize online migration data visualizations, and what do they suggest for the politics of representing migration and informing public attitudes? Audiences increasingly encounter quantitative information through visualization, especially in digital environments. Yet visualizations have political dimensions that manifest themselves through “conventions,” or shared symbols and practices conveying meaning. Using content ana…
Cascading Activation Revisited
Social media have become conduits through which audiences can challenge elites in media and politics. Recent updates to cascading activation, originally developed to explain how frames flowing from powerful figures gain public dominance, give greater theoretical scope for audiences to exert influence. Yet empirical understanding of how and in what circumstances this happens with respect to agenda-setting—another core media effect—is not well-deve…
Building and diversifying our interdisciplinary giants
Visual brokerage
Researchers increasingly use visualisation to make sense of their data and communicate findings more widely. But these are not necessarily straightforward processes. Theories of knowledge brokerage show how sociopolitical contexts and intermediary organisations that translate research for public audiences shape how users engage with evidence. Applying these ideas to data visualisation, I argue that several kinds of brokers (such as data collector…
Media Independence through Routine Press-State Relations
When and how does press coverage maintain independence from governments’ preferred language? Leading scholarship argues that elites shape media content, especially in foreign affairs settings where journalists rely on official sources. But do media push back in domestic policy contexts? Focusing on immigration in Britain, we find press coverage exhibits signs of autonomy that rely on the state’s administrative branches. Our evidence comes from au…
Who Counts in Crises? The New Geopolitics of International Migration and Refugee Governance
Recent migration ‘crises’ raise important geopolitical questions. Who is ‘the migrant’ that contemporary politics are fixated on? How are answers to ‘who counts as a migrant’ changing? Who gets to do that counting, and under what circumstances? This forum responds to, as well as questions, the current saliency of migration by examining how categories of migration hold geopolitical significance—not only in how they are constructed and by whom, but…
Clean skins
How do border security practitioners engage with data and technology, and what difficulties or limitations arise from these engagements? Responding to calls for critically examining how technological 'solutions' are enacted, we analyse the notion of e-Borders in the UK context as an assemblage comprising abstract conditions, concrete objects, and agents whose roles often manifest themselves through perceptions and practices. We draw upon intervie…
Understanding and Overcoming the Barriers for Cost-effective Conservation
Factors that impact how civil society intermediaries perceive evidence
Civil society organisations increasingly mediate the creation and exchange of evidence in their activities with policy-makers and practitioners. This article extends knowledge on evidence in policy-making settings to civil society contexts. As an exploratory and qualitative study, it shows how nine UK-based organisations working on issues including migration and social welfare hold different perceptions of evidence and its usefulness. A range of …
The work that visualisation conventions do
This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers’ belief that through visualisation, it is possible to ‘do good with data’ [Periscopic. 2014. Ho…
Engaging with (big) data visualizations
As data become increasingly ubiquitous, so too do data visualisations, which are the main means through which non-experts get access to data. Most visualizations circulate and are shared online, and many of them are produced by Internet researchers. For these reasons, data visualization is an important object of study for Internet research. This paper proposes that Internet research should engage critically with data visualization, and it does so…
Factors that impact how civil society intermediaries perceive evidence
Civil society organisations increasingly mediate the creation and exchange of evidence in their activities with policymakers and practitioners.This paper extends knowledge on evidence in policymaking settings to civil society contexts.As an exploratory and qualitative study, it shows how nine UK-based organisations working on issues including migration and social welfare hold different perceptions of evidence and its usefulness.A range of related…
The Reconstruction of Kinship from Archaeological Data
Archaeologists have recently attempted to reconstruct the residence and descent systems of particular prehistoric communities. Based on a study of residence and descent theory and pertinent examples from the ethnographic literature, we conclude that unless extremely detailed historical data exists, the analysis of kinship is best left to the ethnographer. The paper was conceived of as an attempt by archaeologically oriented anthropologists to res…
Constructing Immigrants
Public opposition to immigration in Britain reflects perceptions of immigrants that focus disproportionately on “illegal” immigration and asylum seekers, rather than more numerous workers, students, and family members. This study examines coverage of immigration in the British national press, to see whether press portrayals of migrants provide a basis for these images of immigration underlying public attitudes. We use corpus linguistic methods to…
Who Counts in Crises? The New Geopolitics of International Migration and Refugee Governance
Recent migration ‘crises’ raise important geopolitical questions. Who is ‘the migrant’ that contemporary politics are fixated on? How are answers to ‘who counts as a migrant’ changing? Who gets to do that counting, and under what circumstances? This forum responds to, as well as questions, the current saliency of migration by examining how categories of migration hold geopolitical significance—not only in how they are constructed and by whom, but…
Clean skins
How do border security practitioners engage with data and technology, and what difficulties or limitations arise from these engagements? Responding to calls for critically examining how technological 'solutions' are enacted, we analyse the notion of e-Borders in the UK context as an assemblage comprising abstract conditions, concrete objects, and agents whose roles often manifest themselves through perceptions and practices. We draw upon intervie…
Shock Mobilities During Moments of Acute Uncertainty
The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how these reactions impact politics and societies. Specifically, we propose the concept of “shock mobility” as migratory routines radically reconfigured: emer…
The conventions and politics of migration data visualizations
What visual features characterize online migration data visualizations, and what do they suggest for the politics of representing migration and informing public attitudes? Audiences increasingly encounter quantitative information through visualization, especially in digital environments. Yet visualizations have political dimensions that manifest themselves through “conventions,” or shared symbols and practices conveying meaning. Using content ana…
Media Independence through Routine Press-State Relations
When and how does press coverage maintain independence from governments’ preferred language? Leading scholarship argues that elites shape media content, especially in foreign affairs settings where journalists rely on official sources. But do media push back in domestic policy contexts? Focusing on immigration in Britain, we find press coverage exhibits signs of autonomy that rely on the state’s administrative branches. Our evidence comes from au…
Next slide please
How do governments visually communicate policies, and what does this reveal about actors’ political objectives? Governments strategically narrate their priorities, yet few studies examine this process through visual modes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understanding in policy studies by focusing on the UK government’s COVID-19 response through its daily press briefings during the first wave of 2020. Combining quantitative changepoint…
Photovoice in Kenya
Photovoice, a community-based participatory research method, was utilized to delineate the health-related needs of a small rural community in Kenya. Within the Cherangany Constituency, 13 women were recruited and trained in digital photography and appropriate ethical conduct in photography (respect for privacy, consent, and confidentiality). Both individual and group interviews were conducted with the participants, and data were transcribed and a…
Policy preferences in response to large forced migration inflows
What migration policies do people in receiving countries prefer, and to what extent do humanitarian concerns matter for these preferences? Despite sustained scholarly attention to migration attitudes in high-income countries, much less work examines public policy preferences—particularly in low- and middle-income countries that receive most forced migrants globally. While legislators can propose and implement migration policies involving multiple…
Combining Computational and Archival Methods to Study International Organizations
Researchers studying international organizations have access to growing and varied archives due to digitization efforts. While developments in computational methods confer efficiency gains for examining these materials at scale, they raise concerns about their validity when applied to interpretive tasks in historical settings. In response, we present a general and flexible workflow that uses simple computational techniques from linguistics to enh…
Building and diversifying our interdisciplinary giants
Cascading Activation Revisited
Social media have become conduits through which audiences can challenge elites in media and politics. Recent updates to cascading activation, originally developed to explain how frames flowing from powerful figures gain public dominance, give greater theoretical scope for audiences to exert influence. Yet empirical understanding of how and in what circumstances this happens with respect to agenda-setting—another core media effect—is not well-deve…
I am From Busia!”
Critical researchers in anthropology, politics, and history have profited from the spatial turn, or the idea that spaces produced through practices and perceptions influence observable social action, in showing how people at borders derive specific economic and social benefits from their unique location. This is especially relevant in African border contexts where state presence is often modified or resisted by local agendas. However, less work e…
How universities facilitate city network socialization through knowledge exchange on immigrant integration
Universities increasingly facilitate as well as study social change alongside decision-makers and users. This is partly in response to demands for civic engagement and demonstrable public impact. While existing scholarship has critically examined these collaborations' impacts, less work addresses either how they develop or what benefits they confer to participants-especially those operating at local scales. By examining two university-initiated n…
Worst of the Bunch
Benchmarking theories argue voters use information about other countries’ performances, usually on the economy and obtained through experience or media, to evaluate their own governments. Yet existing observational evidence is relatively fragile and struggles to distinguish how people become more knowledgeable. Using a pre-registered experiment, we showed UK respondents a chart displaying the UK’s exceptionally high cumulative COVID-19 deaths eit…
Communicating Economic Evidence About Immigration Changes Attitudes and Policy Preferences
Existing studies demonstrate that threat perceptions matter for immigration attitudes. However, while these perceptions are potentially sensitive to information about immigrants’ impacts, questions remain about whether inserting such information into public debates changes attitudes and policy preferences—especially on polarizing issues like immigration. Moreover, few studies have considered messages featuring the type of nonphotorealistic visual…
Visual bordering
Theories of symbolic bordering highlight how xenophobic media coverage and humanitarian messaging create boundaries between migrants and receiving communities partly based on deservingness. Contrasting with studies of mainly text-based representations of refugees, we examine refugee-serving organizations’ visual communications work on Instagram. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, we collected 191 posts made in early 2021 by …
We are Sitting on a Time Bomb
Recent discussion in critical border studies has reaffirmed the validity and necessity of multiperspectival approaches which move beyond state-centric outlooks to include diverse viewpoints of people at or on borders. One understudied aspect of everyday border life involves how international development organisations fit within wider dynamics of cross-border activities. Drawing upon experiences of development projects at a key border crossing bet…
Developing ethical approaches to data and civil society
This research note reflects on the gaps and limitations confronting the development of ethical principles regarding the accessibility of large-scale data for civil society organizations (CSOs). Drawing upon a systematic scoping study on the use of data in the United Kingdom (UK) civil society, it finds that there are twin needs to conceptualize accessibility as more than mere availability of data, as well as examine the use of data among CSOs mor…
The Reconstruction of Kinship from Archaeological Data
Archaeologists have recently attempted to reconstruct the residence and descent systems of particular prehistoric communities. Based on a study of residence and descent theory and pertinent examples from the ethnographic literature, we conclude that unless extremely detailed historical data exists, the analysis of kinship is best left to the ethnographer. The paper was conceived of as an attempt by archaeologically oriented anthropologists to res…
DTC genetic testing companies fail transparency prescriptions
In 2007, the American Society of Human Genetics issued recommendations for what the new and largely self-regulating industry offering genetic tests directly to consumers should disclose to potential customers. Websites for every DTC company offering health-related genetic tests as identified by a public policy group were evaluated for compliance with those transparency recommendations. The results showed that only six of the 25 companies studied …
Analyzing Visual Signals as Visual Scenes
The study of visual signal design is gaining momentum as techniques for studying signals become more sophisticated and more freely available. In this paper we discuss methods for analyzing the color and form of visual signals, for integrating signal components into visual scenes, and for producing visual signal stimuli for use in psychophysical experiments. Our recommended methods aim to be rigorous, detailed, quantitative, objective, and where p…
I am From Busia!”
Critical researchers in anthropology, politics, and history have profited from the spatial turn, or the idea that spaces produced through practices and perceptions influence observable social action, in showing how people at borders derive specific economic and social benefits from their unique location. This is especially relevant in African border contexts where state presence is often modified or resisted by local agendas. However, less work e…
Epilogue
Naturally, one can’t cover everything worth mentioning about classical literature in a Very Short Introduction—or even a very long one—but I have tried to show that this literature is far from being stuffy or irrelevant, and that its best works remain as entertaining and provocative as ever. In my beginning is my end (to quote a modern classic), and so let the last word on the power of literature go to Homer, describing the effects of the bard De…
Developing ethical approaches to data and civil society
This research note reflects on the gaps and limitations confronting the development of ethical principles regarding the accessibility of large-scale data for civil society organizations (CSOs). Drawing upon a systematic scoping study on the use of data in the United Kingdom (UK) civil society, it finds that there are twin needs to conceptualize accessibility as more than mere availability of data, as well as examine the use of data among CSOs mor…
Extraneous color affects female macaques’ gaze preference for photographs of male conspecifics
We are Sitting on a Time Bomb
Recent discussion in critical border studies has reaffirmed the validity and necessity of multiperspectival approaches which move beyond state-centric outlooks to include diverse viewpoints of people at or on borders. One understudied aspect of everyday border life involves how international development organisations fit within wider dynamics of cross-border activities. Drawing upon experiences of development projects at a key border crossing bet…
The work that visualisation conventions do
This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers’ belief that through visualisation, it is possible to ‘do good with data’ [Periscopic. 2014. Ho…
Engaging with (big) data visualizations
As data become increasingly ubiquitous, so too do data visualisations, which are the main means through which non-experts get access to data. Most visualizations circulate and are shared online, and many of them are produced by Internet researchers. For these reasons, data visualization is an important object of study for Internet research. This paper proposes that Internet research should engage critically with data visualization, and it does so…
Factors that impact how civil society intermediaries perceive evidence
Civil society organisations increasingly mediate the creation and exchange of evidence in their activities with policymakers and practitioners.This paper extends knowledge on evidence in policymaking settings to civil society contexts.As an exploratory and qualitative study, it shows how nine UK-based organisations working on issues including migration and social welfare hold different perceptions of evidence and its usefulness.A range of related…
Constructing Immigrants
Public opposition to immigration in Britain reflects perceptions of immigrants that focus disproportionately on “illegal” immigration and asylum seekers, rather than more numerous workers, students, and family members. This study examines coverage of immigration in the British national press, to see whether press portrayals of migrants provide a basis for these images of immigration underlying public attitudes. We use corpus linguistic methods to…
Photovoice in Kenya
Photovoice, a community-based participatory research method, was utilized to delineate the health-related needs of a small rural community in Kenya. Within the Cherangany Constituency, 13 women were recruited and trained in digital photography and appropriate ethical conduct in photography (respect for privacy, consent, and confidentiality). Both individual and group interviews were conducted with the participants, and data were transcribed and a…
Understanding and Overcoming the Barriers for Cost-effective Conservation
Factors that impact how civil society intermediaries perceive evidence
Civil society organisations increasingly mediate the creation and exchange of evidence in their activities with policy-makers and practitioners. This article extends knowledge on evidence in policy-making settings to civil society contexts. As an exploratory and qualitative study, it shows how nine UK-based organisations working on issues including migration and social welfare hold different perceptions of evidence and its usefulness. A range of …
Visual brokerage
Researchers increasingly use visualisation to make sense of their data and communicate findings more widely. But these are not necessarily straightforward processes. Theories of knowledge brokerage show how sociopolitical contexts and intermediary organisations that translate research for public audiences shape how users engage with evidence. Applying these ideas to data visualisation, I argue that several kinds of brokers (such as data collector…
Media Independence through Routine Press-State Relations
When and how does press coverage maintain independence from governments’ preferred language? Leading scholarship argues that elites shape media content, especially in foreign affairs settings where journalists rely on official sources. But do media push back in domestic policy contexts? Focusing on immigration in Britain, we find press coverage exhibits signs of autonomy that rely on the state’s administrative branches. Our evidence comes from au…
Who Counts in Crises? The New Geopolitics of International Migration and Refugee Governance
Recent migration ‘crises’ raise important geopolitical questions. Who is ‘the migrant’ that contemporary politics are fixated on? How are answers to ‘who counts as a migrant’ changing? Who gets to do that counting, and under what circumstances? This forum responds to, as well as questions, the current saliency of migration by examining how categories of migration hold geopolitical significance—not only in how they are constructed and by whom, but…
Clean skins
How do border security practitioners engage with data and technology, and what difficulties or limitations arise from these engagements? Responding to calls for critically examining how technological 'solutions' are enacted, we analyse the notion of e-Borders in the UK context as an assemblage comprising abstract conditions, concrete objects, and agents whose roles often manifest themselves through perceptions and practices. We draw upon intervie…
Building and diversifying our interdisciplinary giants
The conventions and politics of migration data visualizations
What visual features characterize online migration data visualizations, and what do they suggest for the politics of representing migration and informing public attitudes? Audiences increasingly encounter quantitative information through visualization, especially in digital environments. Yet visualizations have political dimensions that manifest themselves through “conventions,” or shared symbols and practices conveying meaning. Using content ana…
Cascading Activation Revisited
Social media have become conduits through which audiences can challenge elites in media and politics. Recent updates to cascading activation, originally developed to explain how frames flowing from powerful figures gain public dominance, give greater theoretical scope for audiences to exert influence. Yet empirical understanding of how and in what circumstances this happens with respect to agenda-setting—another core media effect—is not well-deve…
The politics of data visualisation and policy making
Data visualisation has become ubiquitous in everyday life, from seeing images in news media to tracking individual health indicators. While the effects of data visualisation on society and people have been explored within a range of literature, there has been far less attention paid to the interconnectedness of data visualisation and policy making. In this special issue, we explore how data visualisation matters for policy priorities, processes a…
Combining Computational and Archival Methods to Study International Organizations
Researchers studying international organizations have access to growing and varied archives due to digitization efforts. While developments in computational methods confer efficiency gains for examining these materials at scale, they raise concerns about their validity when applied to interpretive tasks in historical settings. In response, we present a general and flexible workflow that uses simple computational techniques from linguistics to enh…
How universities facilitate city network socialization through knowledge exchange on immigrant integration
Universities increasingly facilitate as well as study social change alongside decision-makers and users. This is partly in response to demands for civic engagement and demonstrable public impact. While existing scholarship has critically examined these collaborations' impacts, less work addresses either how they develop or what benefits they confer to participants-especially those operating at local scales. By examining two university-initiated n…
Political science (27 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Politics (16 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Public relations (14 obras) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (13 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · Business (8 obras)