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

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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