[Commlist] CfP Datafication and the Welfare State - Special Collection for the Communication and Media Section of Global Perspectives

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T1kLi9u3QJC4aYWhjQU0amVDXoXGlC4m9yY7pO1OP1I/mobilebasic

*Call for papers*

Special Collection for the Communication and Media Section of /Global 
Perspectives/

*Estimated Timeline*

1st July 2019 - 500-word abstracts

  * Please submit abstracts to Lina Dencik ((_DencikL /at/ cardiff.ac.uk)
    <mailto:(DencikL /at/ cardiff.ac.uk)>_) and Anne Kaun ((_anne.kaun /at/ sh.se)
    <mailto:(anne.kaun /at/ sh.se)>_)
20th of July 2019 - notification of invitation to submit full papers 
(6000-8000 words)

1st of November 2019 - submission of full papers

1st of April 2020 - review process complete

1st of June 2020 - publication of articles

*Datafication and the Welfare State*

The impact of globalization on the welfare state has been a prominent 
long-standing issue in both scholarly and policy debate. Whilst the 
advent of digital technologies has been central to this debate, the more 
recent onus on data and data-driven technologies across business, 
government and civil society brings with it a particular set of 
concerns. Data and algorithmic processes are increasingly an integral 
part of governing populations and used to categorize, profile and score 
individuals, households and communities, with a view to allocate 
services, target and identify people, and make decisions about them. In 
this sense, datafication is part of (re)shaping state-citizen relations, 
the nature of statecraft and (re)defining state models, particularly in 
relation to public services and welfare provision. Advancing unevenly 
and in diverse contexts, this trend is often underpinned by a rationale 
centred on efficiency, resource-saving and more ‘objective’ 
decision-making. Yet critical scholarship on datafication has pointed to 
the ways in which this ‘new public analytics’ paradigm (Yeung 2018) is 
embedded in a particular set of values, and advances certain 
epistemological and ontological assumptions that carry substantial 
social and political significance (e.g. boyd and Crawford 2012, Van 
Dijck 2014). Moreover, both assumptions and responses to such 
assumptions have tended to rely on universalist understandings of 
developments and rights, bypassing nuanced and contextual engagement 
with the way data systems are developed, implemented and understood 
across the globe (Arora 2019; Milan & Treré 2019). For this special 
collection, we therefore invite submissions that engage with the notion 
of the welfare state from global perspectives, with a particular focus 
on datafication.

We seek contributions that examine the kinds of practices, values and 
logics that underpin the advancement of datafication and consider how 
these relate to the practices, values and logics that form the basis of 
public services and social welfare in the context of globalisation.  For 
example, research has suggested that data analytics advances a society 
organized around risk management, in which it is assumed that it is 
possible to predict individual behaviour from the aggregation of data 
points pertaining to group traits, with the aim to both pre-empt 
and personalize risk (Amoore 2013, Van Dijck 2014, Andrejevic 2017). In 
addition, many of the tools being deployed originate in a commercial 
sphere, perpetuating the presence of multi-national companies in the 
public sector, often favouring economic values rather than social, 
relational and personal values (Baym 2013, Redden 2015). These logics 
can be seen as the continued dismantling of the welfare state, 
understood in terms of a commitment to universal access, 
decommodification, and social solidarity. Moreover, the prevalence of 
data science as developed and practiced by a few dominant global players 
raise questions about the standardization of governance and statecraft. 
By fleshing out these issues, the special collection invites 
contributions that reflect on transformations brought about by data 
processes in the public sector and across social life, and contextualise 
these in terms of different value-systems and visions for how society 
should be organised.

References:

Andrejevic, M. (2017). To pre-empt a thief. /International Journal of 
Communication/, 11(2017), pp. 879-896.

Amoore, L. (2013). /The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security 
Beyond Probability/.  Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Arora, P. (2019). Decolonizing Privacy Studies. /Television & New 
Media/, 20(4): 366-378.

Baym, N. K. (2013). Data Not Seen: The Uses and Shortcomings of Social 
Media Metrics. /First Monday/, 18(10).

boyd, d. and Crawford, K. (2012). Critical Questions for Big Data. 
/Information, Communication & Society/, 15(5), pp. 662-679.

Milan, S. and Treré, E. (2019) Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data 
Universalism. /Television & New Media, /20(4): 319-335.

Redden, J. (2015). Big data as system of knowledge: investigating 
Canadian governance. In: G. Elmer, G. Langlois and J. Redden, J., eds., 
/Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data/, London: Bloomsbury.

Van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data 
Between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology. /Surveillance & Society/, 
12(2), pp. 197-208.

Yeung, K. (2018) Algorithmic government: Towards a New Public Analytics? 
Paper presented at ThinkBig, Windsor, 25 June.

*Practicalities*

Please submit a 500-word abstract to Lina Dencik ((_DencikL /at/ cardiff.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(DencikL /at/ cardiff.ac.uk)>_) and Anne Kaun ((_anne.kaun /at/ sh.se) 
<mailto:(anne.kaun /at/ sh.se)>_) before 1 July 2019.

The special collection will be published as part of the Communication 
and Media Section of the /Global Perspectives/ journal. Full papers – 
6000-8000 words in length – are required by 1 November 2019.

*About the journal*

/Global Perspectives/ (GP) is an online-only, peer-reviewed, 
transdisciplinary journal seeking to advance social science research and 
debates in a globalizing world, specifically in terms of concepts, 
theories, methodologies, and evidence bases. Work published in the 
journal is enriched by invited perspectives, through scholarly 
annotations, that enhance its global and interdisciplinary implications.

GP is devoted to the study of global patterns and developments across a 
wide range of topics and fields, among them trade and markets, security 
and sustainability, communication and media, justice and law, governance 
and regulation, culture and value systems, identities, environmental 
interfaces, technology-society interfaces, shifting geographies and 
migration.

GP sets out to help overcome national and disciplinary fragmentation and 
isolation.  GP starts from the premise that the world that gave rise to 
the social sciences in their present form is no more. The national and 
disciplinary approaches that developed over the last century are 
increasingly insufficient to capture the complexities of the global 
realities of a world that has changed significantly in a relatively 
short period of time.  New concepts, approaches and forms of academic 
discourse may be called for.

*About the Communication and Media Section of /Global Perspectives /*

Section Editor: Payal Arora, Erasmus University Rotterdam

The ‘global turn’ in communications, advances in mobile technologies and 
the rise of digital social networks are changing the world´s media 
landscapes, creating complex disjunctures between economy, culture, and 
society at local, national, and transnational levels. The role of 
traditional mass media - print, radio and television - is changing as 
well. In many cases, traditional journalism is declining, while that of 
user-generated content by bloggers, podcasters, and digital activists is 
gaining currency worldwide, as is the impact of robotics and artificial 
intelligence on communication systems. Today, researchers find 
themselves at important junctures in their inquiries that require 
innovations in concepts, frameworks, methodologies and empirics. /Global 
Perspectives/ aims to be a forum for scholars from across multiple 
disciplines and fields, and the Communication and Media Section invites 
submissions on cutting-edge research on changing media and communication 
systems globally.

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