[Air-L] Special issue on 'data activism'

[Stefania Milan]

Dear colleagues, we are proud to present to you a special issue on ‘data activism’ of Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, edited by myself and Lonneke van der Velden (University of Amsterdam). Our goal was to ‘reverse’ data politics, and the various articles take up the challenge from different disciplinary perspectives. And Krisis is an open-access journal, so the articles are and will remain free to download!
Authors include Jonathan Gray, Helen Kenney, Lina Dencik, Stefan Baack, Miren Gutierrez, Leah Horgan and Paul Dourish, plus as many as three book reviews. See the brief description below. The whole issue is accessible from http://krisis.eu <http://krisis.eu/>. 
ENJOY and SHARE!
Best, Stefania
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Issue 1/2018: Data activism
Digital data increasingly plays a central role in contemporary politics and public life. Citizen voices are increasingly mediated by proprietary social media platforms and are shaped by algorithmic ranking and re-ordering, but data informs how states act, too. This special issue wants to shift the focus of the conversation. Non-governmental organizations, hackers, and activists of all kinds provide a myriad of ‘alternative’ interventions, interpretations, and imaginaries of what data stands for and what can be done with it.

Jonathan Gray starts off this special issue by suggesting how data can be involved in providing horizons of intelligibility and organising social and political life. Helen Kennedy's contribution advocates for a focus on emotions and everyday lived experiences with data. Lina Dencik puts forward the notion of ‘surveillance realism’ to explore the pervasiveness of contemporary surveillance and the emergence of alternative imaginaries. Stefan Baack investigates how data are used to facilitate civic engagement. Miren Gutiérrez explores how activists can make use of data infrastructures such as databases, servers, and algorithms. Finally, Leah Horgan and Paul Dourish critically engage with the notion of data activism by looking at everyday data work in a local administration. Further, this issue features an interview with Boris Groys by Thijs Lijster, whose work Über das Neue enjoys its 25th anniversary last year. Lastly, three book reviews illuminate key aspects of datafication. Patricia de Vries reviews Metahavens’ Black Transparency; Niels van Doorn writes on Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek and Jan Overwijk comments on The Entrepeneurial Self by Ulrich Bröckling.
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Stefania Milan
Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam | https://stefaniamilan.net 
Principal Investigator, DATACTIVE (ERC Starting Grant 639379) | https://data-activism.net
@annliffey | @data_ctive
+31627875425 | +31(0)205252416