Archive for December 2022

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[Commlist] New book: The Informational Logic of Human Rights: Network Imaginaries in the Cybernetic Age

Sun Dec 04 18:02:01 GMT 2022



Josh Bowser's book The Informational Logic of Human Rights has been published. It is the most recent volume in the Technicities book series:

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-informational-logic-of-human-rights.html


The Informational Logic of Human Rights
Network Imaginaries in the Cybernetic Age
Joshua Bowsher

Shows how digital capitalism has shaped human rights practices

Offers an in-depth and critical examination of the processes and pitfalls of human rights Contributes an original theoretical approach that intervenes in influential and current debates regarding the limits of human rights Uses three ‘case studies’ based on particular human rights practices – conceptualizing violations as events, using indicators to monitor social and economic rights and the contemporary uses of machine learning and big data Provides new theoretical tools that can support ongoing efforts to articulate a more radical vision of human rights

What happens to the cultural politics of human rights when atrocities are rendered calculable, abuses are transformed into data, and victims become vectors? As human rights organizations have increasingly embraced information technologies this ‘datafication’ of rights has become both a reality and a pressing concern, one inextricably tangled up with questions regarding the broader political valences of human rights.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beyond the Neoliberal Critique?
1. Cybernetic Capitalism/Informational ‘Politics’
2. Seeing Violations as Events: Technologies of Capture and Cutting
3. Doing Rights as Indicators: Informatizing Social and Economic Rights
4. When Violations Become Vectors: Human Rights Work in the Era of Big Data
5. After Informational Logic: Rethinking Information/Rethinking Rights
Notes



Into the struggle to understand how human rights politics arose in tandem with the neoliberal economics of our times steps Josh Bowsher with a revelatory new framework. The age of human rights has also been the age of information -- and the informational mode prevalent in our phase of capitalism has caged a potentially radical politics. Exploring how this has happened, often reducing movements to shame and stigma, without engaging distribution and redistribution as readily, this intrepid book also looks to a future liberated from existing limitations.
    – Samuel Moyn, Yale University




Josh Bowsher is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex, following a recently completed Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Brunel University. Broadly speaking, Josh’s research explores the often-fraught relationships between human rights discourses, contemporary capitalism and radical change. His work has been published in Social & Legal Studies, The European Journal of Social Theory, New Formations, and Theory & Event.
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