Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures

Klimburg-Witjes, Nina; Poechhacker, Nikolaus; Bowker, Geoffrey C.

doi:10.28938/9781912729050

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In the west, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC), the WHO, and the ECDC are endlessly monitoring their screens, attempting to detect the next big outbreak of disease; in the South and East the Chinese and Brazilian CDCs are important hubs. 12 Currently, these information infrastructures are reshaping our knowledge about epidemics: new disease patterns and outbreaks becoming visible through the development of new infrastructures (Caduff, 2014;Kelly, 2018;Lee, 2020;Mackenzie, 2014;Sanches and Brown, 2018).…”

Section: Assembling Pandemicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the ECDC outbreaks are continually being assembled, updated, displayed, and debated about. A host of methods are used to classify and value disease intensities, disease threats, and disease risks, which can lead to conflicts between different actors about the understanding of an outbreak (Keck, 2008;Lee, 2020). One visualization, which has been part of disease control for hundreds of years, involves enumerating cases in time and space.…”

Section: Leementioning

confidence: 99%

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Enacting the Pandemic

Lee

2020

S&TS

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This article has two objectives: First, the article seeks to make a methodological intervention in the social study of algorithms. Today, there is a worrying trend to analytically reduce algorithms to coherent and stable objects whose computational logic can be audited for biases to create fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAccT). To counter this reductionist and determinist tendency, this article proposes three methodological rules that allows an analysis of algorithmic power in practice. Second, the article traces ethnographically how an algorithm was used to enact a pandemic, and how the power to construct this disease outbreak was moved around through by an algorithmic assemblage. To do this, the article traces the assembling of a recent epidemic at the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention—the Zika outbreak starting in 2015—and shows how an epidemic was put together using an array of computational resources, with very different spaces for intervening. A key argument is that we, analysts of algorithms, need to attend to how multiple spaces for agency, opacity, and power open and close in different parts of algorithmic assemblages. The crux of the matter is that actors experience different degrees of agency and opacity in different parts of any algorithmic assemblage. Consequently, rather than auditing algorithms for biased logic, the article shows the usefulness of examining algorithmic power as enacted and situated in practice.

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Section: Assembling Pandemicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Leementioning

confidence: 99%

Enacting the Pandemic

Lee

2020

S&TS

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Experimenting with the Social Life of Homes: Sensor Governmentality and Its Frictions

Tironi

Valderrama

2021

Science as Culture

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Island Imaginaries: Introduction to a Special Section

Gugganig

Klimburg-Witjes

2021

Science as Culture

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Colonial empires, scientists, philanthropists and Hollywood studios have long sustained an image of islands as remote places with unique ecologies and cultures, experimental labs, or loci of escapism. The climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have contributed to a predominant view of islands as both exceptional spaces and testbeds to be scaled up onto continental or planetary levels. Likewise, the metaphor of the island is foundational to Western thought yet has been less explored in the context of scientific processes and technology development. Bringing together science and technology studies (STS) with critical Island Studies and related fields, this special section expands upon the spatial dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries to consider islands and their imaginations as both preexisting and channeling visions of science and technology. The introduced concept of Island Imaginaries captures the mutual constitution of island visions and their materialization in scientific, technological and technocratic endeavors that are imagined and pursued by scientific communities, policymakers, and other social collectives. Such an approach explores the co-constitutive dynamic of islands as sites for the foundation of technoscientific knowledge regimes, and the concomitant rendering of islands as conducive places for discovery and experimentation. The special section offers empirical case studies with insights into islands as synecdoche for larger wholes (the Earth), as experimental and exceptional sites for trialing business creation and political orders (in Singapore, and for Asia), and as variously interpreted laboratory paradise (of Hawai'i). Further research themes for STS are suggested in the Conclusion.

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Sensing In/Security: Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Enacting the Pandemic

Enacting the Pandemic

Experimenting with the Social Life of Homes: Sensor Governmentality and Its Frictions

Island Imaginaries: Introduction to a Special Section

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