Tag Archives: digital sociology

My academic publications for 2023

Books

  • Lupton, D. (2023) The Internet of Animals: Human-Animal Relationships in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity.
  • Lupton, D. (2023) Risk (revised 3rd edition). Abingdon: Routledge.

Book chapters

  • Pavlidis, A., Fullagar, S., Nichols, E., Lupton, D., Forsdike, K. and Thorpe, H. (2023) Experimenting with research creation during a pandemic: making time capsules with girls in sport. In Andrews, D., Thorpe, H. and Newman, J. (eds), Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times: COVID Assemblages. Cham: Springer, pp. 241-267.

Journal articles

  • Baraitser, P. and Lupton, D. (2023) Photodiagnosis of genital herpes and warts: a sociomaterial perspective on users’ experiences of online sexual health care. Culture, Health and Sexuality, 25(2), 192-205.
  • Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2023) The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map drawing method. Visual Studies, 38(3-4), 594-607.
  • Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2023) The materialities and embodiments of mundane software: exploring how apps come to matter in everyday life. Online Information Review, 47(2), 398-413.
  • Watson, A., Wozniak-O’Connor, V. and Lupton, D. (2023) Health information in creative translation: establishing a collaborative project of research and exhibition making. Health Sociology Review, 32(1), 42-59.
  • Lupton, D. (2023) Attitudes to COVID-19 vaccines among Australians during the Delta variant wave: a qualitative interview study. Health Promotion International, 38(1). Available online at https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daac192
  • Lupton, D. and Lewis, D. (2023) Australians’ experiences of COVID-19 during the early months of the crisis: a qualitative interview study. Frontiers in Public Health (11). Available online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1092322
  • Lupton, D., Fuentes, A. and Mingo, EG. (2023) Presente y futuro da la sociologia digital: entrevista a Deborah Lupton. Teknokultura, 20(2), 239-242.
  • McLean, J., Southerton, C. and Lupton, D. (2023) Young people and TikTok use in Australia: digital geographies of care in popular culture. Social & Cultural Geography, online ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2230943
  • Butler, E. and Lupton, D. (2023) Bubbles, fortresses and rings of steel: risk and socio-spatialities in Australians’ accounts of border controls during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social & Cultural Geography, online ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2240290
  • Lupton, D., Noremberg Schubert, Luz David, M.M., Coelho de Oliveira, D. Arthur Saldanha dos Santos, D.A. (2023) Entrevista com Deborah Lupton. Revista Cadernos de Campo, 23(1). Available online at https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/cadernos/article/view/18350
  • Lupton, D., Wozniak-O’Connor, V., Rose, M. and Watson, A. (2023) More-than-human wellbeing: materialising the relations, affects, and agencies of health, kinship and care. M/C Journal. Available online at https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/2976
  • Boydell, K. and Lupton, D. (2023) Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic: documenting suffering and care in conditions of physical isolation and uncertainty. Medical Humanities, online ahead of print. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2023-012768    
  • Lupton, D. (2023) Sociocultural dimensions of health: contributions to studies on risk, digital sociology, and disinformation. Reciis: Revista Electronica de Comunicacao Informacao & Inovacao em Saude. 17(4). Available online at https://doi.org/10.29397/reciis.v17i4.4036

Creative works

Reports and briefing papers

New book now out: The Internet of Animals: Human-Animal Relationships in the Digital Age

This book has now been published. It is available from the Polity website here. A video of me giving a talk about the book is here.

Here is the list of contents:

Introduction

1 Conceptualizing Humans, Animals and Human–Animal Relations

2 Animal Enthusiasts, Activism and Politics in Digital Media

3 The Quantified Animal and Dataveillance

4 Animal Cuteness, Therapy and Celebrity Online

5 Animal Avatars and Zoomorphic Robots

Conclusion: Reimagining Human–Animal Relations

Below is an excerpt from the Introduction chapter, explaining the main themes and issues discussed in the book:

The Internet of Animals is the first book to bring together perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to consider how digital technologies are contributing to human-animal relationships at both the micropolitical and macropolitical levels. It builds on and extends a growing interest in social and cultural inquiry in: i) the digitization and datafication of humans and other animals with and through new digital media and ‘smart’ devices; ii) the affective and embodied relationships between humans and other animals; iii) the health and environmental crises in which human health and wellbeing are inextricably entangled with other animals and living creatures; and iv) more-than-human theoretical perspectives. The book delves into the ways that animals across a range of species and in a multitude of spaces are represented and incorporated into various forms of digital technologies, and the consequences for how we think and feel about as well as relate to and treat other animals.

Across the book’s chapters, the broader socioeconomic, cultural, biological and geographical contexts in which these technological interventions have emerged and are implemented are carefully considered. Many animal species are becoming threatened by catastrophic changes to their habitats and lives caused by humans, such as ecological degradation and pollution; climate change, global warming and extreme weather events; and the clearing of forests to make way for industries or the expansion of cities. Animals’ health and wellbeing have been severely undermined by these human-wrought crises, including exacerbating their exposure to disease, depriving them of their usual food sources, disrupting breeding cycles, accelerating species extinction and contributing to biodiversity loss. Industries devoted to the mass production of digital technologies (mobile and other computing devices, Wi Fi devices and digital data storage facilities) and to energy generation to power these technologies, together with the accumulation of non-degradable ‘e-waste’ from discard devices and contribution to landfill toxins, make a massive contribution to these detrimental effects on planetary health. Digital media play a major role in drawing publics’ attention to cases of animal mistreatment and cruelty, but also contribute to the objectification of animals and the vilification of species deemed to be threats to human welfare or the economy, requiring tight containment or extermination.

… Throughout the book I analyse the content and use of these devices, software and media from a sociocultural perspective, identifying implications for human-animal relationships and for generating ideas about future developments for digital technologies that have the potential to contribute to both human and nonhuman animal flourishing across the world. I argue that the ways in which animals are portrayed, monitored and cared for by humans using digital media and devices have significant implications for how humans and animals will live together in the near future: including human and animal health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability and activism, and industries related to digital technology development, animal care, animal protection, food production and consumption as well as smart farming, smart homes and smart cities.

… a series of questions are addressed, as follows: How are human-animal relationships changing, and how are digital media and devices contributing to this change? What do humans and other animals lose and gain when animals are digitized and datafied? What are the implications of a more-than-human approach for ethical and caring relationships between humans and other animal species? What are the implications for both human and animal health and wellbeing – and at a larger scale, for planetary health?

In addressing these questions, I engage with the expanding body of more-than-human theory that focuses on the embodied and multisensory dimensions of people’s encounters with digital technologies and digital data, and the affective forces and capacities that are generated with and through these relationships. My approach to digitization and datafication recognises that digital technologies and digital data are vibrant agents in the lives of humans and animals, configuring animal-human-digital assemblages that are constantly changing as technologies come together with humans and animals in place, space and time.

… Chapter 1 introduces the foundational concepts and theoretical perspectives on human-animals relations offered from relevant scholarship across the humanities and social sciences and discusses how they contribute to the key issues and themes discussed in the book. The next four chapters focus on specific ways in which animals are portrayed in digital media and monitored with the use of ‘smart’ technologies. Chapter 2 addresses the topic of animal activism and other political issues concerning humans’ treatment of and relationships with animals, including contestation and conflicts between actors in this online space. In Chapter 3, the plethora of rationales, imaginaries and practices configuring the dataveillance of animals are examined: including those devices designed for caring for pets or protection of wildlife as well as technologies incorporated into ‘smart farming’ initiatives. Chapter 4 focuses on the affective dimensions of cuteness and celebrity as they are expressed in relation to animals in digital media, as well as the positioning of animals as therapeutic objects. The representation of animals in computer games and zoomorphic robots are the subject of Chapter 5. While these digital technologies may seem quite distinct from each other, the strong influence of Japanese culture is evident in both modes for digitizing animals. The brief conclusion chapter summarise the main points made in the book and provokes thinking about the futures of the Internet of Animals, with a particular focus on the use of digital technologies in arts-based initiatives that seek to attune humans to their role as merely one animal species in complex multispecies ecosystems.

My publications for 2022

Authored books

  • Lupton, D. (2022) COVID Societies: Theorising the Coronavirus Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge.

Edited books

  • Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (eds) (2022) Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Abingdon: Routledge.
  • Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds) (2022) Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge.

Book chapters

  • Lupton, D. (2022) The sociology of mobile apps. In Rohlinger, D. and Sobieraj, S. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media. New York: Oxford, pp. 197-218.
  • Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (2022) Thinking, making, doing, teaching and learning: bringing creative methods into health education. In Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (eds), Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Abingdon: Routledge.
  • Lupton, D. (2022) Data: the futures of personal data. In The Routledge Handbook of Social Futures. London: Routledge, pp. 117-125.
  • Lupton, D. (2022) Digital health. In Monaghan, L. and Gabe, J. (eds), Key Concepts in Medical Sociology, 3rd edition. London: Sage, pp. 241-246.
  • Lupton, D. (2022) The sociomaterial nature of the body and medicine. In Scrimshaw, S., Lane, S., Rubenstein, R. and Fisher, J. (eds), Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine, 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, pp. 103-121.
  • Lupton, D. and Southerton, C. (2022) Beyond ‘wicked Facebook’: a vital materialism perspective. Emotional Landscapes, Dystopia and Future Imaginaries. In McKenzie, J. and Patulny, R. (eds). Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 34-51.
  • Lupton, D., Clare, M. and Southerton, C. (2022) Digitized and datafied embodiment: a more-than-human approach. In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, edited by Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M. and Müller, C.J. Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 1-23.
  • Pink, S., Ruckenstein, M., Berg, M. and Lupton, D. (2022) Everyday automation: setting a research agenda. In Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds), Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1-19.
  • Lupton, D. (2022) The quantified pandemic: digitised surveillance, containment and care in response to the COVID-19 crisis. In Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds), Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 59-72.
  • Southerton, C., Clark, M., Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) The futures of qualitative research in the COVID-19 era: experimenting with creative and digital methods. In Matthewman, S. (ed), A Research Agenda for COVID-19 and Society. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 155-174.
  • Lupton, D. (2022) Health zines: hand-made and heart-felt. In The Routledge Handbook of Health and the Media, edited by Lester Friedman and Therese Jones. New York: Routledge.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

  • Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2022) ‘The day everything changed’: Australians’ COVID-19 risk narratives. Journal of Risk Research, 25(10), 1147-1160.
  • Lupton, D. (2022) ‘Next generation PE?’ A sociomaterial approach to digitised health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, 27(5), 516-528.
  • Lupton, D. and Lewis, D. (2022) Coping with COVID-19: the sociomaterial dimensions of living with pre-existing mental health illness during the early stages of the coronavirus crisis. Emotion, Space & Society, 42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100860
  • Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2022) Sociomaterialities of health, risk and care during COVID-19: experiences of Australians living with a medical condition. Social Science & Medicine, 293.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114669 
  • Baraitser, P. and Lupton, D. (2022) Photodiagnosis of genital herpes and warts: a sociomaterial perspective on users’ experiences of online sexual health care. Culture, Health and Sexuality, online first.
  • Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) Remote fieldwork in homes during the COVID-19 pandemic: video-call ethnography and map drawing methods. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2022.2043774
  • Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2022) The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map drawing method. Visual Studies, online first.
  • Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) ‘What happens next? Using the story completion method to surface the affects and materialities of digital privacy dilemmas. Sociological Research Online, 27(3), 690-706.
  • Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2022) Research-creations for speculating about digitised automation: bringing creative writing prompts and vital materialism into the sociology of futures. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(7), 754-766.
  • Lupton, D. (2022) Understandings and practices related to risk, immunity and vaccination during the Delta variant COVID-19 outbreak in Australia: an interview study. Vaccine: X, 11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvacx.2022.100183
  • Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2022) App stories: how mobile apps come to matter in everyday life. Online Information Review, online first. 
  • Rich, E. and Lupton, D. (2022) How sociomaterial relations shape English secondary students’ digital health practices: beyond the promissory imaginaries. Social Science & Medicine, 311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115348
  • Lupton, D. From human-centric digital health to digital One Health: crucial new directions for planetary health. Digital Health, 8. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221129103
  • Lupton, D. (2022) Socio-spatialities and affective atmospheres of COVID-19: a visual essay. Thesis Eleven, 171(1), 36-65.

Arguing on Facebook about COVID: a case study of key beliefs, rationales and strategies

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, social media platforms have become well-known for both disseminating misinformation and conspiracy theories as well as acting as valuable information sources concerning the novel coronavirus and governments’ efforts to manage and contain COVID. Facebook in particular – the world’s most popular social media site – has been singled out as a key platform for naysayers such as anti-vaccination exponents and ‘sovereign citizens’ to express their resentment at containment measures such as lockdowns, quarantine and self-isolation regulations, vaccination mandates and face-covering rules.

What rationales and beliefs underpin these arguments? How and to what extent are they contested or debated on Facebook? What rhetorical strategies are employed by commentators to attempt to persuade others that their views/facts are correct?

To explore these questions, I chose a case study of a short video (2 minutes 5 seconds long) shared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Facebook on 19 February 2022. I came across the video three days after it was published on the platform as part of my routine Facebook use. It turned up in my feed because a Facebook friend of mine had shared it (which it how the average Facebook user is presented with content from organisations like WHO if they don’t follow these accounts themselves.) I noticed how much engagement this post had received in those three days. There were 6,000 reactions: including 5k likes but also 551 laughing face emojis (suggesting viewers found the video content risible), 1.2k comments, 2.2k shares and 244k views. I decided to delve into the comments thread to see what people were saying in response to the video.

WHO’s official Facebook page has a huge follower base: at the time that I viewed this video, their page listed over 14 million likes and over 38 million followers. It is clearly a highly trusted Facebook presence. Many of its posts have thousands of reactions (the use of emojis to respond to posts), likes, comments and shares. WHO shares content at least once a day and often more frequently: most of this content is made by WHO itself in its role to communicate preventive health messages globally. In reviewing their latest content, it is evident that WHO has a very busy and accomplished team making their social media content.

The video featured two WHO experts: Dr Mike Ryan (pictured above from the opening section of the video) and Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, both of whom feature regularly in WHO’s social media content. Ryan was introduced in a caption as ‘ED, WHO Health Emergencies Programme’ and Van Kerkhove as ‘COVID-19 technical lead, WHO Health Emergencies Programme’.

In this video, both people spoke to camera as if to an unseen interviewer, explaining why they were concerned about governments beginning to loosen COVID restrictions too quickly.

The written introduction to the video stated:

Some countries are lifting all public health and social measures despite high numbers of COVID-19 cases/deaths. Dr Mike Ryan and Dr Maria Van Kerkhove explain why a slow approach is better.

Ryan and Van Kerkhove went on to use simple English to acknowledge that there is a strong desire on the part of governments and citizens to ‘open up’ and remove all COVID restrictions and ‘go back to normal’. They warn, however, that such actions could lead to the pandemic continuing ‘much longer than it needs to be’ due to ‘the political pressure to open up’ in ‘some situations’, and that replacing abandoned control measures would be difficult if a new variant emerged. Ryan and Van Kerkhove emphasise the importance of ‘a slow, step-wise approach’ to lifting COVID restrictions rather than an ‘all-or-nothing approach’ that ‘many countries’ are adopting at this point in the COVID crisis.

Both speakers are careful not to single out individual leaders or governments for criticism in these quite vague statements, leaving it up to the viewer to make a judgement about exactly to which ‘situation’ they are referring. These experts also ‘acknowledge uncertainty’ and that their concerns may be unfounded but emphasise the need for caution. They note that they do not ‘blame anyone’ for feeling confused, given the continual flux in governments’ COVID measures. Van Kerkhove ends by stating firmly that ‘you [the video viewers] have control over this’ regardless of government actions and then Ryan chimes in by asking ‘every individual just to look at your situation’ and ‘be smart, protect yourself, protect others, get vaccinated and just be safe and careful’.

There’s a lot that could be said about the statements made by these two WHO experts in this video: the veiled critique of ‘many countries” government actions and health communication efforts, the focus on individual responsibility in the face of government inaction and lack of responsibility. But I wanted to direct my attention to the more than 1,000 comments Facebook users wrote in response to this video.

I noticed first that comments came from all over the world – evidence again of the global reach and popularity of Facebook. When commentors were responding to each other, therefore, there were many examples of someone in Asia, South America or Africa engaging with Facebook users located in the USA, Australia, Canada, Europe or the UK.

Another observation was that a vigorous debate was occurring in the comments section, with supporters of the video’s messages seeking to argue with those who decried what they saw as an overly cautious or even unscientific argument from the WHO experts. Those who did not support the WHO’s points made such arguments as (my paraphrasing):

  • opening up will help the economy – people need jobs
  • people’s lives need to get back to ‘normal’
  • most populations are now adequately vaccinated, so there is no need for further restrictions
  • governments are lying to their citizens and spreading false information as a way of exerting greater control over them
  • the novel coronavirus does not exist and nor does COVID
  • it is risk to one’s health to wear masks for prolonged periods of time
  • other health conditions kill more people than COVID
  • COVID mass testing and mass vaccination have been conducted as a profit-making enterprise serving Big Pharma and governments
  • WHO’s facts are wrong and they are spreading lies and fear, trying to promote their own interests for political purposes
  • WHO has shown little leadership during the pandemic and is ineffectual
  • face masks give a false sense of security and are useless as a preventive measure
  • people who follow government restrictions are being controlled and can’t think for themselves
  • the pandemic has been going on for two years and governments and health agencies like WHO are still not controlling it adequately
  • the person commenting does not like to feel forced to do anything by government authorities, especially if restrictions/mandates do not help the situation (in their view) – ‘my body, my choice’
  • even vaccinated people can still become infected with or transmit the coronavirus, fall ill or die of COVID – they are therefore pointless
  • COVID is ‘real’ but controllable like influenza or no worse than the common cold
  • governments who continue to impose restrictions/mandates are ‘Socialist’
  • people’s immune systems can be strengthened without vaccines due to basic health promoting strategies
  • people are dying from being given too many COVID vaccines (including children), not from the disease itself
  • vaccines are ‘bioweapons’
  • the medical establishment and the government are forcing COVID vaccines on people and hiding evidence of their serious side-effects
  • there is a difference between ‘dying with COVID’ and ‘dying from COVID’ – governments and health agencies are deliberately obscuring this
  • people need to be freed from living in fear
  • scientists and medical experts are controlled by governments to serve political agendas
  • ‘commonsense’ practices such as eating a healthy diet, taking Vitamin D and washing hands regularly will adequately protect against COVID

People who supported the points made by the WHO experts in the video tended to be reactive in their comments, responding to the naysayers using such rationales as:

  • COVID is a real threat and has killed many people – we still need to be cautious to protect ourselves and others
  • even though the situation seems to be improving in many countries, new variants could emerge that could pose major challenges
  • scientific and medical knowledge and expertise should be trusted over other information sources
  • many people are still dying
  • opening up too quickly will lead to many more deaths globally
  • vaccines do protect against serious disease and death and everyone should accept them: the benefits outweigh any risk
  • face masks are important protective agents against infection (just as shoes, for example, protect against foot injuries)
  • people who don’t want to conform to COVID restrictions/mandates are being selfish and don’t understand the importance of self-sacrifice to protect others
  • wearing face masks and getting vaccinated are small sacrifices to make for the greater good and saving others’ lives as well as self-protection
  • economies are damaged if too many workers become ill from COVID and can’t go to work
  • the person commenting still feels at high risk from COVID and is happy to continue to engage in preventive measures such as wearing masks and accepting vaccination
  • young children have not yet been protected by COVID vaccination in many countries and therefore are vulnerable to infection
  • mass vaccination programs have worked well globally to protect people against other serious diseases, such as polio
  • people who support dropping all restrictions are engaging in magical thinking or do not want to face reality
  • low income countries do not have enough medical support to help people who become ill with COVID
  • countries should work together in a global response to COVID rather than simply pursing nationalistic interests

Rhetorical strategies on the part of both ‘sides’ of the argument included:

  • giving examples from their own lives/health (e.g. they had avoided COVID because of wearing face masks and getting vaccinated or they avoided COVID because their immune systems were naturally strong and not weakened by vaccines)
  • describing the situations of people they knew personally (e.g. those who died from COVID vaccines or those who died because they refused COVID vaccines)
  • urging people to ‘do their research’ or ‘due diligence’ and not just rely on television, social media or what their friends tell them
  • accusing those who are disagreeing with them of ‘lying’, ‘making up facts to suit their agenda’, as ‘stupid’ or simply gullible (to either misinformation or in believing the science)
  • providing hyperlinks to articles or blog posts outside of Facebook to support their claims and urging others to read them as part of educating themselves about the ‘facts’
  • claiming ‘truth’ in response to ‘non-truths’, ‘lies’ or ‘fake news’
  • contrasting the value of all human lives versus the value of individual freedom
  • the use of large numbers to support the validity of the arguments

As just one example of a pithy exchange between two commentators:

Commentator 1: We can’t stop living.

Commentator 2: 900,000 Americans have.

These findings demonstrate the kinds of beliefs and rationales underpinning Facebook users’ concepts of COVID risk and their attitudes towards COVID restrictions. Both sides received ardent support from others. Comments sometime descended into ad hominem attacks but most of the content was focused on presenting opinions or ‘facts’ and responding to these arguments with counter-claims. Most of the commentators attempted to act as educators, challenging the misinformation or extreme views put forward by the naysayers. Emotions ran high as people defended their position or accused others of stupidity, blindness to the truth or making up facts. Some extreme misinformation positions and conspiracy theories were advanced (e.g. ‘the holy blood of Jesus Christ is our only protection’) but many arguments concerned topics such as whether vaccines were necessary or effective (and how many there should be) or raised issues around the politics of COVID control.

The main insight from this single case study of COVID commentary in response to a peak health agency’s video posted to Facebook is that there was little evidence of an echo-chamber or filter bubble where only one main viewpoint was put foward. Instead, vigorous debate and contestation about ‘the truth’ went on in the comments section, suggesting an open forum for many opinions to be aired. However, it was also clear that people’s opinions or beliefs were not challenged in and through the debates or comments. Despite all the argumentation and presenting of examples from personal experience or hyperlinks to other material, no consensus or acceptance of other people’s opposing views was evident in these comment threads.

My 2021 publications

Books

Lupton, D., Southerton, C., Clark, M. and Watson, A. (2021) The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociocultural Analysis. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Edited books and special issues

Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds) (2021) The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge.

‘In and beyond the smart home’ special issue. Convergence (volume 27, issue 5), 2021.

Journal articles

Lupton, D. (2021) Young people’s use of digital health in the Global North: narrative review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, available online at https://www.jmir.org/2021/1/e18286/

Lupton, D. and Southerton, C. (2021) The thing-power of the Facebook assemblage: why do users stay on the platform? Journal of Sociology, 57(4), 969-985.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Not the real me’: social imaginaries of personal data profiling. Cultural Sociology, 15(1), 3-21.

Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2021) Tactics, affects and agencies in digital privacy narratives: a story completion study. Online Information Review, 45(1), 138-156.

Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2021) Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies. Media International Australia, 178(1), 136-150.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Things that matter’: poetic inquiry and more-than-human health literacy. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 13(2), 267-282.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘The internet both reassures and terrifies’: exploring the more-than-human worlds of health information using the story completion method. Medical Humanities, 47(1), 68-77.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Next generation PE?’ A sociomaterial approach to digitised health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, online first doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2021.1890570

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Sharing is caring’: Australian self-trackers’ concepts and practices of personal data sharing and privacy. Frontiers in Digital Health, 3(15). Available online at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2021.649275/full

Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2021) Learning about COVID-19: a qualitative interview study of Australians’ use of information sources. BMC Public Health, available online at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10743-7

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Honestly no, I’ve never looked at it’: teachers’ understandings and practices related to students’ personal data in digitised health and physical education. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 281-293Hjorth, L. and Lupton, D. (2021) Digitised caring intimacies: more-than-human intergenerational care in Japan. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(4), 584-602.

Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2021) Towards more-than-human digital data studies: developing research-creation methods. Qualitative Research, 21(4), 463-480.

Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2021) The COVID digital home assemblage: transforming the home into a work space during the crisis. Convergence, 27(5), 1207-1221.

Downing, L., Marriott, H. and Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Ninja levels of focus’: therapeutic holding environments and the affective atmospheres of telepsychology during the COVID-19 pandemic. Emotion, Space & Society, 40. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100824

Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2021) ‘The day everything changed’: Australians’ COVID-19 risk narratives. Journal of Risk Research, online first, doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2021.1958045

Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2021) Pandemic fitness assemblages: the sociomaterialities and affective dimensions of exercising at home during the COVID-19 crisis. Convergence, 27(5), 1222-1237.

The Lancet and Financial Times Commission on governing health futures 2030: growing up in a digital world. Kickbusch, I., Piselli, D., Agrawal, A., Balicer, R., Banner, O., Adelhardt, M., Capobianco, E., Fabian, C., Singh Gill, A., Lupton, D., Medhora, R. P., Ndili, N., Ryś, A., Sambuli, N., Settle, D., Swaminathan, S., Morales, J. V., Wolpert, M., Wyckoff, A. W., Xue, L., Bytyqi, A., Franz, C., Gray, W., Holly, L., Neumann, M., Panda, L., Smith, R. D., Georges Stevens, E. A., & Wong, B. L. H. (2021) The Lancet and Financial Times Commission on governing health futures 2030: growing up in a digital world. The Lancet. Available online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673621018249

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘All at the tap of a button’: mapping the food app landscape. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(6), 1360-1381.

Petrie, K., Deady, M., Lupton, D., Crawford, J., Boydell, K. and Harvey. S. (2021) ‘The hardest job I’ve ever done’: a qualitative exploration of the factors affecting junior doctors’ mental health and wellbeing during medical training in Australia. BMC Health Services. Available online at https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-021-07381-5

Book chapters

Lupton, D. (2021) Self-tracking. In Kennerly, M., Frederick, S. and Abel, J.E. (eds), Information: Keywords. Columbia University Press, pp, 187-198.

Lupton, D. (2021) Afterword: future methods for digital food studies. In Leer, J. and Krogager, S.G.S. (eds), Research Methods in Digital Food Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 222-227.

Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (2021) COVID Society: introduction to the book. In Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds), The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 3-13.

Lupton, D. (2021) Contextualising COVID-19. In Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds), The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 14-24.

Other publications

Lupton, D., Pink, S. and Horst, H. (2021) Living in, with and beyond the ‘smart home’: introduction to the special issue. Convergence, 27(5), 1147-1154.

Watson, A., Clark, M., Southerton, C. and Lupton, D. (2021) Fieldwork at your fingertips: creative methods for social research under lockdown. Nature Career Column, 3 March 2021. Available at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00566-2

Lupton, D., Pink, S. and Horst, H. (2021) Living in, with and beyond the ‘smart home’: introduction to the special issue. Convergence, 27(5), 1147-1154.

Excerpt from Introduction of Data Selves

My new book Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives is due for publication next month. Below is an edited excerpt from the Introduction chapter, in which I explain my theoretical approach.

The phenomenon of personal digital data poses a challenge at an ontological level. Personal data blur and challenge many of the binary oppositions and cultural boundaries that dominate in contemporary western societies. Personal data are both private and public. They could be considered to be owned by, and part of, the people who have generated them, but these details are also accessed and used by a multitude of other actors and agencies. At a deeper level, personal data challenge the ontological boundaries between the binary oppositions of Self/Other, nature/culture, human/nonhuman, and living/dead. Discussions of how digital data about and for people are incorporated into everyday lives must therefore grapple with the problem of how we conceptualise the idea of ‘the human’ and life’ in relation to the digital data that are generated by and for humans. Because digital data are associated with non-human entities such as digital devices and software, and because they are often viewed as non-material entities, they are often de-humanised and de-materialised in discourses. The oft-used term ‘big data’, for example, tends to portray large digital datasets as de-personalised and anonymous, even though these datasets are often comprised of very intimate and sensitive details about people and their lives. Alternatively, explanations of how people collect and make sense of their own data are often reduced to individualised models of cognition or behavioural psychology, removing the sociocultural, sensory and affective dimensions of how people generate and respond to these details about themselves …

In what follows, I examine the interplay of human and nonhuman affordances associated with digital technologies – devices, software and the digital data they generate – and the agential capacities that are opened up or closed off as these things assemble. I ponder the questions of who benefits from these agential capacities, and in whose interests they operate. Here again, affective forces are central to the engagements of humans with these nonhuman things and the capacities that are generated by their gatherings. I address how human-data assemblages can generate agential capacities that empower and vitalise actors in the assemblage; but can also expose them to vulnerabilities and harms.

This approach recognises the entanglements of personal digital data assemblages with human action, reaction and understanding of the world. Personal digital data assemblages are partly comprised of information about human action, but their materialisations are also the products of human action, and these materialisations can influence future human action. While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh). The primary analytical focus is understanding what personal data assemblages allow bodies to do, and how they come to matter in people’s lives.

Feminist new materialism also calls into question and problematises how we might define and materialise personal data. While the literatures on datafication and dataveillance tend to assume that personal data are digital artefacts that are primarily materialised in two-dimensional visual formats as the outcomes of humans’ encounters with digital technologies, an emergent body of scholarship in what has been termed ‘posthuman’ or ‘post-qualitative’ inquiry (Lather and St. Pierre 2013; MacLure 2013) contends that data about humans can be any kind of matter, both organic and inorganic. Human flesh, bones, tissue, blood, breath, sweat or tears, human sensory and affective responses and reactions, objects that people use as part of their mundane routines, or artworks and creative writing outputs, for example, are among the materialisations of and participants in human experience that can be viewed and treated analytically as ‘data’ (Koro-Ljungberg et al. 2017; Taylor et al. 2018).

Drawing on this perspective, I argue that examining the multitude of media (loosely defined) that are used to represent personal data, including arts-based and three-dimensional approaches, is one way of working towards a different way of thinking about their onto-ethico-epistemological aspects. Expanding the definition of what materials can be treated as personal data works to highlight the performative, embodied, multisensory, affective and agential dimensions of human-data assemblages. Not only does this perspective acknowledge the more-than-human worlds of personal data, it also highlights the more-than-digital dimensions of these assemblages.

In this book, I take up calls by Barad (in Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012) and Braidotti (2018) for a critical posthuman studies that incorporates an affirmative ethics. For Braidotti (2018), the mutable and distributed nature of human agency offers a politics that is able to challenge current fears and preoccupations. Cartographies of power relations and their associated entitlements, agencies and capacities can provide detailed ways of thinking through and with political practices and subjectivities. They help to think differently about figurations of human action, belief and practice, their implications, boundaries and limitations, and how new modes of being and acting can be configured and political change effected.

Central to my argument is that in the face of the continuing de-personalisation and de-humanisation of details about people’s bodies and lives that have been rendered into digital data, a new onto-ethico-epistemological position should be developed that reinvests human-data assemblages with different meanings and reconceptualises what we mean by ‘personal data’ – and indeed, how we think about and treat our ‘data selves’. In so doing, we can begin to think more seriously and deeply about what is at stake when human-data assemblages are de-personalised and de-humanised. If these new ways of thinking are taken up, they have significant that go to the core of selfhood, social relations and embodiment as they are enacted in more-than-human worlds.

In making my argument in the pages of this book, I seek to engage in what Barad (2007) refers to as ‘diffractive methodology’, which attempts to work with different bodies of research and theory to generate new insights. As she notes, it is the diffractive patterns of resonances and dissonances that make entanglements of matter and meaning visible. For Barad, diffractive thinking goes beyond critique to ethical engagements, involving reading insights through one another: ‘Diffractive readings bring inventive provocations; they are good to think with’ (Barad in Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012: 50). In the spirit of a diffractive approach, this book’s content is intentionally interdisciplinary and eclectic. While I work principally with feminist new materialism theory, relevant perspectives offered from scholarship in the anthropology of material culture, digital sociology, media studies, internet studies, cultural studies, information studies, archival studies, human-computer interaction studies, education, archaeology and cultural geography are also included.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of these perspectives and begins to explore how they might be taken up to theorise the more-than-human worlds of human-data assemblages. In Chapter 3, I address the ways in which personal data as a phenomenon is materialised in words, images and three-dimensional representations, including provocations and interventions from design- and arts-based approaches that offer alternative ways of thinking about personal data. In Chapters 4 and 5, I draw on empirical material from several research projects I have conducted since 2015 to provide insights into how people conceptualise and live their personal data (details of these projects are provided in the Appendix.) Chapter 4 discusses how people enact and make sense of their personal data and identifies the relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities generated by doing data. Chapter 5 reviews the ways in which the tension between the sharing ethos of participatory digital media and the dystopian imaginaries that circulate concerning the ‘internet knowing too much’ about people are dealt with in everyday data concepts and practices. In the Final Thoughts section, I present my vision for how a new ethics of caring about and living with our data selves might be developed.

 

In-conversation about digital health and Data Selves

In June 2019, I took part in an ‘in conversation’ event at King’s College London, organised by the Social Science & Urban Public Health Institute. The conversation was transcribed and published on the Institute’s website. They have kindly given permission for me to repost the content here. Thank you to Benjamin Henckel and Shayda Kashef for their work on this event and the post.

On 13th June 2019 the Social Science & Urban Public Health Institute (SUPHI) at King’s College London hosted a special in-conversation event with Professor Deborah Lupton. During the event Professor Lupton discussed her forthcoming book Data Selves, and reflected on the role that digital technologies are playing in the urban public health landscape.

Below is an edited version of the transcript from the event. Special thanks to sponsor, PLuS Alliance.

By Benjamin Hanckel and Shayda Kashef

What is digital health and where do you see the field at now?

Digital health is  a  short, snappy title to refer to the huge range of digital technologies that are used to apply to health, right through from older technologies such as websites, search engines, online discussion forums, through to things like 3D printing of body parts and apps and all those kinds of digital technologies that are quite new on the scene. So I think digital health for me encompasses that diverse range of ways that certain forms of healthcare and health communication can be digitised. And given that there are more and more of these technologies emerging, there’s never something I have to wonder writing about because there’s always something new on the horizon and it’s really interesting to  trace their trajectory and find how older technologies are often forgotten about. Google search is probably the number one most highly used digital health technology because people use it as a form of self-triage, and it’s interesting to me how those older technologies are often forgotten about in the rush and the excitement of the social imaginaries that represent newer technologies, such as apps and wearable devices, which is the brave new world of healthcare. People are often still getting much more value from websites and online discussion forums, for example, than they are getting from health apps.

Putting this in the context of your current work, can you tell us about the Vitalities Lab you set up at the University of New South Wales and how it relates to digital health?

I’ve been building on my previous interest in Foucauldian theory now to incorporate some perspectives from new materialisms and particularly feminist new materialisms and vital materialisms, as there’s an overlap between those two materialisms but they aren’t the same thing. I’ve only been at the University of New South Wales for four months but as part of my appointment I was encouraged to set up a research team. The name Vitalities is meant to denote the kinds of directions and interests that I have at the moment. So to begin with I’ve been writing a lot about ‘lively data’ over the past few years and that means people’s personal data and about the digital data economy and how digital data about people take on value. They are lively because people engage with data about their bodies and themselves in ways that synergistically change their own lives, they may respond to their own data and change aspects of their lives based on what their data are telling them. So that’s the notion of lively data.

Vital materialism gets back to that idea of vitalities as well. So, some of the feminist new materialism scholarship that I’ve been engaging with, particularly the work of  Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, talk a lot about capacities and affective forces, and how they are generated through interactions that people have with other humans and with non-human actors. It’s very much this idea that there are capacities that are generated when people come together with other people, with non-humans, which I’m trying to explore in my recent research, of course within particular digital technologies, how people engage with their digital devices but also their data to generate new capacities. So that gets back to that vitality as well, there are these capacities constantly being generated and reformed and reconfigured with and through devices and data.

Can you expand on how ‘vitalities’ might contribute to new ways of thinking about methods and methodological enquiry?

In terms of theoretical methods, there’s a sort of emerging approach to qualitative empirical research, post-qualitative inquiry, that I’ve also found really interesting to work with lately. And there’s a very strong overlap of post-qualitative inquiry with more than human theory, because post-qualitative inquiry sees research as always being a research assemblage, as always being partially emergent and sort of going away from the very positivist approach to qualitative approaches which have dominated a lot of health related qualitative enquiry of late. Every type of research is always a research assemblage: the researcher is always part of the data that they generate. So that’s where post-qualitative research departs from the more positivist approach to qualitative research. It’s interesting how the more than human theory is now being brought into research methods: and that’s what I’m trying to do with the kind of work that I’m doing recently, when I’m writing up my own empirical research and analysing it to bring in post-qualitative perspectives as well as the more than human theory that I’m trying to think with when I’m generating concepts that I’m using to analyse my empirical data. So the empirical data might include traditional forms of data such as interview transcripts, or focus group transcripts, but with post-qualitative methods they often now include arts-based materials, drawings, storyboards that people might have made in workshops. I’ve been experimenting with a method called story completion recently, which involves people finishing stories that we start for them and then inviting them to create the narrative, which is another form of research material that I think can be quite interesting to use as a way of understanding people’s experiences. So that’s been a really new method that I’ve been experimenting with as another way of accessing people’s feelings and experiences in ways that they themselves might find hard to articulate if we’re just asking them in an interview to articulate. Because often they’re such mundane experiences for people that coming at it from a more oblique way or a more sort of creative way can be an interesting way to access those kinds of experiences and fears.

Can you expand on how you have engaged with some of these themes in your most recent work, and in particular in your forthcoming book Data Selves? 

Data Selves covers what I call ‘living data’ and it gets back to the lively data I was talking about earlier, but also how people live with and through and alongside their personal data. In Data SelvesI’m really trying to expand on feminist new materialism, human data assemblages ideas, and I argue that people’s personal data are often represented in dematerialised and depersonalised ways, such as when we talk about the big data phenomenon, the data tsunami and being overwhelmed by data. And we often forget that not all data that are generated by, for example smart cities or by any other form of data generation, are about non-humans. But a lot of those data are about actual humans, about their lives, about their bodily practices and habits and routines.

With Data Selves, as the title suggests, I wanted to bring in that more than human, non-human aspect and to understand data human assemblages as all human assemblages, and bring in that humanity and re-humanise this core data. And for me that raises a different form of ethics around those data. I’m arguing that we should think of personal data in similar ways, as sort of embodied, human, not fleshy but they’re kind of about our flesh, that sort of ambiguous ontology. So I would argue that we need to think of them in certain ways like we think of other body parts and other body attributes that people donate or give or sell in some situations as very much human remains, and I’m arguing that that’s how we should treat people’s personal data, and that raises questions about the ethics of how other people might use those data and seek to profit from those data.

In the book I draw on a few of my empirical research projects, which do talk about people, about how they engage with and make sense of their data, and I’m arguing that we need to understand people’s engagements with their data as very often infused with affect, vulnerabilities, multi-sensory engagement. So there’s actually a chapter on what I call materialisations of data, when I talk about social imaginaries of data, the very utopian ideas of data as being very productive and generative, and how people themselves can benefit from their own data. So there’s that very positive representation. Then what’s interesting that over the past few years though, when talking about people’s personal data there’s this very dystopian representation of data that privacy no longer exists. So you’ve got really interesting polar representations of how people’s data can be used in both positive and negative ways.

I did a project which I called the Data Personas Project and that built on the design methods approach, personas. I called it their data persona, or a profile of you that’s made about details about you from your online and app related encounters and engagements. And then I asked people to imagine the futures of their data persona, because I think there’s a lot of interesting and intriguing ways we can think about inviting people to imagine futures, rather than having futures imagined for them, on behalf of them by others. I also asked them how similar or different is your data persona from you? Some people did imagine a dystopian idea whereby nothing is private, you know, the internet knows everything about me, but most people said the internet doesn’t know everything about me, it doesn’t know my internal beliefs and feelings, and so on. So I thought that was really interesting because we also get this discourse in media studies in particular and surveillance studies which is very critical of the idea that people think privacy is dead and they’re not concerned about their privacy, you know, the privacy paradox, so yes, people say “I’m worried about my privacy” but they don’t do anything to actually protect their privacy. But that research that I did using the data persona concept kind of shows that people don’t think that their privacy has been completely taken over by the internet.

There is an ongoing debate about data capture for the common good, versus data capture that is perceived as morally questionable. How might we think about these boundaries?

I try to avoid a really normative approach to these kinds of ethical discussions. The context is everything. And people’s contexts are so variable and unique to them, that’s what really comes out when you look at the ways that people engage with digital technologies and digital data. If you look at the Association of Internet Researchers document on ethics around doing research with online materials, it’s really interesting because they argue that you have to look at the context for each research project. There shouldn’t be hard and fast guidelines about how social research is used when we’re talking about using people’s personal data. More recently, human ethics committees have become far more aware of that, as people might be putting their information out there when they go online, so it’s become a more complicated situation now. It’s not as easy to get ethics approval and you do actually have to argue for why and how you’ll get those people’s consent or if you don’t, why not and so on, so it’s become far more complicated. All I would say is that there needs to be these very detailed, lengthy considerations about the context.

But all those issues around whether people know that you’re accessing their data, to what extent, now there’s the issue now with de-anonymisation too, Because if you know what you’re doing, data harvesters can be really good at de-anonymising data to generate detailed profiles about people.

But even when a decision is made about if it is appropriate to generate these data and what to use people’s data for, because it might improve public health or improve treatment for medical conditions, really strong data privacies and security measures can be leaked or breached or hacked. So you don’t know what the future of those lively data might be, so that’s very difficult.

The event concluded with a brief Q&A session with the audience which covered a range of issues, including:

  • An expansion of the debate about data collection, and how we manage data capture within the context of emerging technologies, and
  • A discussion about the possibilities for technologies to benefit certain people who are marginalised, such as people with disabilities, with Professor Lupton acknowledging that there is more to do in this area.

Vitalities Lab Newsletter Number 4

 

VITALITIES LAB NEWSLETTER

Number 4, 2 August 2019

The Vitalities Lab is led by SHARP Professor Deborah Lupton, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. Further details here.

New Lab members

In July, the Vitalities Lab welcomed two new postdoctoral fellows: Dr Ashleigh Watson (left) and Dr Clare Southerton.

IMG_1237

Ashleigh will be working on a new ARC Discovery Project ‘Living with Personal Data: Australians’ Understandings and Practices’ with Deborah and Mike Michael, University of Exeter. This project now has its own website, which can be found here. It will be regularly updated with news about the project findings, the methods we are experimenting with and lists of readings we are engaging with.

New publications

  • Lupton, D. (2019) Australian women’s use of health and fitness apps and wearable devices: a feminist new materialism analysis. Feminist Media Studies, online first. doi:10.1080/14680777.2019.1637916
  • Fitzpatrick, K., Leahy, D., Webber, M., Gilbert, J., Lupton, D. and Aggleton, P. (2019) Critical health education studies: reflections on a new conference and this themed symposium. Health Education Journal, online first. org/10.1177/0017896919860882

New grant

Deborah is one of an international team of researchers who has been awarded a network support grant by the Swedish  Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, led by Martin Berg at Malmo University, Sweden. The network will convene activities related to the topic of ‘Re-humanising automated decision making’. Further details are here.

Presentations/workshops

Ashleigh ran a creative methods workshop on Affect, Knowledge and Embodiment at Griffith University, Brisbane, 19 July.  Details of the workshop and the zine created there can be viewed and downloaded here.

Ashleigh will be leading another zine making workshop at the Vitalities Lab on the topic of algorithmic identities in September. She will also be contributing to a TASA workshop on Creativity and Methodological Innovation in the Sociology of Familial and Intimate Relationships to be held 29 November: details are here.

Media appearances

Deborah was quoted in article in Bustle magazine on digital technology designed for women: https://www.bustle.com/p/is-the-rise-of-femtech-a-good-thing-for-women-heres-what-the-experts-think-17993009

Deborah did an interview for ABC Radio Gold Coast about her research on health and fitness apps and wearable devices (9 July)

Upcoming events

Deborah is an invited speaker at the TASA Health Day event on Data, Technology and Sociology in the Age of Digital Health: details are here

Kicking off the project

I’ve set up a new website for my project ‘Living with Personal Data’. I’ve reblogged this first post from this project here. The project can be followed by going to the Home page and scrolling down to provide your email to subscribe.

LIVING WITH PERSONAL DATA

The Living with Personal Data project has just kicked off. We have appointed a Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Ashleigh Watson, to begin working on the project. While we are waiting for our ethics approval, Ashleigh is updating our literature review. In conjunction with the Vitalities Lab led by Deborah Lupton, we are running several pop-up methods workshops in the next few months to experiment with the innovative methods we will be using in our fieldwork, which will include home visits with people living in Sydney, and hands-on workshops with diverse groups of Australians.

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Interview with me about my new book Data Selves

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I did an interview recently with Rafael Grohmann about my new book Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives (out from Polity in October). He has now translated it into Portuguese and published it on his blog DigiLabour: available here.

Below are the original English questions and my written responses.

RG: What does data selves mean in a more-than-human perspective?

DL: A more-than-human perspective acknowledges that humans are always already part of nonhuman relations. Humans and nonhumans come together in assemblages that are constantly changing as humans move through their worlds. From this perspective, digital devices and software assemble with humans, and personal data are generated in and with these enactments. These data assemblages are more-than-human things. People live with and co-evolve with their personal data – they learn from data and data learn from them in a continually changing relationship.

RG: How can feminist materialism theory and the anthropology of material culture help us understand datafication?

DL: In previous work, I have suggested the digital devices can be considered to lively, as can digital data. Building on this approach, I use feminist new materialism and the anthropology of material culture to investigate these dimensions of datafication and dataveillance further. The feminist new materialism scholars I draw on in the Data Selves book are Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad. These scholars share an interest in the affective forces, vitality and distributed nature of agencies as they are generated with and through more-than-human assemblages. Scholars in the anthropology of material culture such as Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam have also called attention to the lively agencies of humans and nonhumans when they gather together. They focus on how humans respond to, learn about and make sense of their worlds when engaging in embodied and sensory encounters with nonhumans. Ingold describes this as ‘being alive to the world’.

In developing my theoretical approach in Data Selves, I found these perspectives helpful in thinking through what Barad calls the ‘onto-ethico-epistemological’ dimensions of datafication and dataveillance. These perspectives have not yet been taken up to any great extent in thinking about datafication and dataveillance. This is the project I am pursuing. It allows for a non-normative ethical approach to datafication and dataveillance that acknowledges the constantly emergent and dynamic nature of lively data selves and the embodied, multisensory and affective dimensions of how humans live with and learn from their data.

RG: In your forthcoming book, do you talk about data selves and quantified self in world of work?

DL: I don’t discuss the workplace to any great extent in Data Selves. In in my previous book The Quantified Self there was quite a bit of discussion of self-tracking in the workplace. Data Selves differs from The Quantified Self in including a lot of discussion of my empirical research projects that I have conducted over the past few years – indeed, since writing The Quantified Self – which involves people discussing their self-tracking practices and their understandings and use of personal data. My research participants didn’t talk much about their data practices in the context of the workplace, apart from some references on the part of some people to using productivity tools. Those who were active self-trackers were predominantly tracking their body weight, fitness, food or calorie intake, sleep and finances.

RG: In the last year, many books on the same subject have been published, such as David Beer, Shoshana Zuboff, Taina Bucher, Tarleton Gillespie, José van Dijck and Thomas Poell. What is the difference of your book, in theoretical and conceptual terms?

DL: My book differs in several ways: 1) in using more-than-human theory to analyse datafication and dataveillance; 2) in discussing findings from my own empirical research into self-tracking and people’s understandings and practices related to their personal data; and 3) including a greater focus on the multisensory dimensions of data materialisations and sense-making, including how artists and critical designers have sought represent personal data or critique datafication and dataveillance in novel ways.

RG: After a few years since your book Digital Sociology, for you, what is the future research agenda of digital sociology?

DL: I have become increasingly interested in more-than-human theory since writing Digital Sociology and also in postqualitative research as well as innovative methods for social inquiry, including experimenting with design- and arts-based methods. Taking these perspectives and methods into new directions for me constitutes the future agenda of digital sociology.