Morgan Currie - Data Justice and the Right to the City

DATA JUSTICE AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

Studies in Global Justice and Human Rights
Series Editor: Thom Brooks

This series publishes ground-breaking work on key topics in the area of global justice and human rights including democracy, gender, poverty, the environment, and just war. Books in the series are of broad interest to theorists working in politics, international relations, philosophy, and related disciplines.

Published titles

Retheorising Statelessness
Kelly Staples

Health Inequalities and Global Injustice
Patti Tamara Lenard and Christine Straehle

Rwanda and the Moral Obligation of Humanitarian Intervention
Joshua J. Kassner

Institutions in Global Distributive Justice
Andrs Mikls

Human Rights from Community
Oche Onazi

Immigration Justice
Peter W. Higgins

The Morality of Peacekeeping
Daniel H. Levine

International Development and Human Aid
Paulo Barcelos and Gabriele De Angelis

Global Justice and Climate Governance
Alix Dietzel

Open AccessData Justice and the Right to the City
Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox and Callum McGregor

www.euppublishing.com/series/sgjhr

DATA JUSTICE AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

Edited by Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox and Callum McGregor

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

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Editorial matter and organisation Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox and Callum McGregor, 2022
The chapters their several authors, 2022

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781474492980

The right of Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox and Callum McGregor to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Introduction: Data Justice and the Right to the City
Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox and Callum McGregor

Part I Algorithmic Government
Dr Morgan Currie

Predictive Policing: Transforming the City into a Medium for Control
Fieke Jansen

Hostile Data, Migration and the City: Enacting and Resisting Spaces of Hostility in the UK
Philippa Metcalfe

Datafied Child Welfare Services as Sites of Struggle
Joanna Redden, Jessica Brand, Ina Sander and Harry Warne

Part II Education
Dr Callum McGregor

The Civic University as Key Agent in the Production of Urban Space
Nicolas Zehner

Rescuing Data Literacy from Dataism
Huw C. Davies

Smart Citizen Apprentices: Digital Urbanism and Coding as Techno-Solutions to the City
Ben Williamson

Part III Gig, Platform and Crowd Labour
Dr Jeremy Knox

Cadies, Clocks and the Data-driven Capital: Incorporating Gig Workers in Edinburgh
Cailean Gallagher

The Students Are Already (Gig) Workers
Karen Gregory

Data (In)justice, Protest and the (Re)making of Space among Fragmented Platform Workers
Alex J. Wood and Vili Lehdonvirta

Part IV Art and Activism in the Datafied City
Dr Morgan Currie

The Street, the Square and the Net: How Urban Activists Make and Use Networked Technologies
Jessica Feldman

Facial Recognition and the Right to Appear: Infrastructural Challenges in Anti-Surveillance Resistance
Benedetta Catanzariti

Data Burdens: Epistemologies of Evidence in Police Reform and Abolition Movements
Britt Paris, Morgan Currie, Irene Pasquetto and Jennifer Pierre

Data Resistance Through Public Art: Reclaiming Narratives In/Of the City
Pip Thornton

Postscript: Doing Data Dialectically: Between Alienation and Democratic Urban Renewal
Callum McGregor

FIGURES

TABLES

AlgorithmWatch is a non-profit research and advocacy organisation committed to evaluating and shedding light on algorithmic decision-making processes that have a social relevance, meaning they are used either to predict or prescribe human action or to make decisions automatically. AlgorithmWatch was founded by Lorena Jaume-Palas, Lorenz Matzat, Matthias Spielkamp and Katharina Anna Zweig. The organisation (gGmbH) is run by Lorenz Matzat and executive director Matthias Spielkamp.

Jessica Brand is a research assistant at the Data Justice Lab and has worked on a number of projects since joining in 2017. These include investigating the impact of automated child welfare services, exploring the possibilities and limits of platform regulation, documenting data harms for the Labs data harm record as well as researching the intersection between data justice and the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act. She is currently working on projects relating to the Labs ongoing research on the theme of civic participation in data-driven decision making. Before joining the Lab she was an intern at Privacy International and is a former student of Cardiff Universitys MA Digital Media and Society.

Benedetta Catanzariti is a PhD candidate in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently looking at the social and political dimensions shaping the design and development of AI systems, as well as the data practices that underlie machine learning models. Her research sits at the intersection of science and technology studies and feminist studies and explores the material practices, histories and epistemologies of computer vision technology.

Morgan Currie is Senior Lecturer in Data and Society in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests focus on open and administrative data, algorithms in the welfare state, activists data practices, cultural mapping and critical GIS. She is principal investigator of The Culture & Communities Mapping Project and the Automating Universal Credit research project and co-leads the Digital Social Science Research Cluster at Centre for Data, Culture & Society. She earned a PhD in information studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Huw C. Davies is a Lecturer in Digital Education (Data and Society) at the University of Edinburgh and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and is affiliated to the Edinburgh Futures Institute. His research and teaching locates digital education with the wider sociologies of education and digital technology. He specialises in operationalising social theory with quantitive and qualitative digital and ethnographic methods. Huw has published articles about digital literacy, knowledge graphs, AI in education, and the tension between structure and agency in digitised societies.