Issue Brief: People with Disabilities and Criminal Justice

In this issue brief, there will be a discussion of the unfair persecution of person with disabilities, how they are more likely to be victimized, and once trialed, if the death sentence is an appropriate sentence

Losing and Finding: On the Curious Life of Ethnographic Objects

Dara Ivanova´s essay on Losing and Finding: On the curious Life of ethnographic Objects deals with how a researcher’s emotions towards his or her research object can be turned into an epistemological tool when working ethnographically with an object. Drawing on her work on a foundling room for infants to be left safely and anonymously for adoption, she describes how researcher and research object form a relationship throughout different phases. Following an object means here to find the relationship one builds with the research object: first becoming attached through curiosity, then thinking through the normativities it provokes in the researcher, follow it into the infrastructures in which it is embedded and embrace the researchers’ emotions towards it by finally turning these emotions into a reflexive ground of making, un-making and re-making an object within the research process

How to study infrastructure : methodological remarks in the context of the pandemic and its impact on city design

The paper is an introduction to the anthropology of infrastructures. We define how infrastructure is understood on the grounds of anthropology and science and technology studies. We show what is the significance of various infrastructures for the functioning of modern and late societies. The text discusses extensively the methodological challenges of studying infrastructures. We not only explain why analyzing infrastructures is difficult but also discuss several methodological tricks we can resort to when trying to uncover infrastructures. We elaborate the methodological guidelines on the margins of two research projects. The first dealt with social aspects of epidemics, and the second with urban clusters of innovative companies

Platformisation of Science

The digital platforms we are dealing with in this article are auxiliary tools that do not produce anything themselves but provide an infrastructure for service providers and users to meet. They have potentially unlimited scaling potential and have become the central places of exchange. In academia we can also observe that research and its communication becomes more digital  and that digital services are aiming to become platforms. In this article we explore the concept of digital platforms and their potential impact on academic research, firstly addressing the question: To what extent can digital platforms be understood as a specific type of research infrastructure? We draw from recent literature on platforms and platformisation from different streams of scholarship and relate them to the science studies concept of research infrastructures, to eventually arrive at a framework for science platforms. Secondly, we aim to assess how science platforms may affect scholarly practice. To this end, we relate common platform practices to scientific practice. Thirdly, we aim to assess to what extent science is platformized and how this interferes with scientific understandings of quality and autonomy. In the end of this article, we argue that the potential benefits of platform infrastructure for academic pursuits cannot be ignored, but the commercialization of the infrastructure for scholarly communication is a cause for concern. Ultimately, a nuanced and well-informed perspective on the impact of platformisation on academia is necessary to ensure that the academic community can maximize the benefits of digital infrastructures while mitigating negative consequences

Co-observing the Weather, Co-predicting the Climate: Human Factors in Building Infrastructures for Crowdsourced Data

This paper investigates the embodied performance of 'doing citizen science'. It examines how 'citizen scientists' produce scientific data using the resources available to them, and how their socio-technical practices and emotions impact the construction of a crowdsourced data infrastructure. We found that conducting citizen science is highly emotional and experiential, but these individual experiences and feelings tend to get lost or become invisible when user-contributed data are aggregated and integrated into a big data infrastructure. While new meanings can be extracted from big data sets, the loss of individual emotional and practical elements denotes the loss of data provenance and the marginalisation of individual efforts, motivations, and local politics which might lead to disengaged participants and unsustainable communities of citizen scientists. The challenges of constructing a data infrastructure for crowdsourced data therefore lie in the management of both technical and social issues which are local as well as global

Infrastructural Work in Child Welfare: incommensurable politics in the Dutch Child Index

The Dutch Child Index is a nationwide information system (IS) designed to alert professionals about each other’s involvedness with at-risk children, enabling identification of individual at-risk children, improvement of multidisciplinary collaboration and timely interventions. In this paper, we study the infrastructural work and complexities engaged in making the collaborative system of the Child Index function in real life and in care situations. We use the information infrastructure perspective as an analytical lens and describe the infrastructural work that is performed to make the Child Index become part of actual practices. We also identify flexibility, heterogeneity and the connection to existing platforms as difficulties participants have had while performing infra- structural work. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it provides an in-depth empirical analysis of this specific collaborative and preventive infrastructure. Second, based on this empirical analysis, we argue that when developing and understanding infrastructures, it is important to identify limits to the integrative capacity and disciplining power of ISs as result of conflicting infrastructural work due to incommensurable politics. perspective as an analytical lens and describe the infrastructural work that is performed to make the Child Index become part of actual practices. We also identify flexibility, heterogeneity and the connection to existing platforms as difficulties participants have had while performing infrastructural work. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it provides an in-depth empirical analysis of this specific collaborative and preventive infrastructure. Second, based on this empirical analysis, we argue that when developing and understanding infrastructures, it is important to identify limits to the integrative capacity and disciplining power of IS’s as result of conflicting infrastructural work due to incommensurable politics

Les rendements du chômage (mesures du travail et travail de mesure à Pôle emploi)

Cette thèse a pour objectif de saisir les modalités d intervention de Pôle emploi sur le marché du travail, depuis sa naissance en 2009. Au sein de l opérateur public de placement, les interactions entre le travail des gestionnaires et celui des conseillers constituent le cœur de cette recherche. Testant l hypothèse selon laquelle les réformes successives des administrations auraient modifié le statut du chiffre dans l action publique, l auteur étudie les mécanismes par lesquels l Etat s autorise à objectiver les résultats de son intervention sur le marché du travail. Fondé sur une observation du travail d accompagnement et sur des entretiens avec les cadres de Pôle Emploi, ce travail éclaire les pratiques quotidiennes de mesure de l efficacité de l Etat. Deux pressions s exercent sur les agents de Pôle emploi : l une provient des objectifs imposés par les tutelles et l autre de l augmentation du nombre de demandeurs d emploi. L enquête analyse les bricolages élaborés par les agents pour résoudre ces tensions. L activité des conseillers à l emploi apparaît, sous cet angle, comme un travail de catégorisation visant à valoriser chacun des 5,5 millions d inscrits dans trois langages distincts : celui du marché, celui des prestations d aide à la recherche d emploi et celui du droit du travail. Les conseillers éprouvent alors la contradiction entre l individualisation des politiques d activation des dépenses de chômage et le caractère collectif du sous-emploi actuel. Cette thèse rend ainsi intelligible le décalage entre le volontarisme politique en matière de lutte contre le chômage et le sentiment d impuissance des agents de l Etat mandatés pour mener cette lutte.This thesis deals with unemployment policies and focuses on the mutual influence of management accountants and counselors in the French one stop shop for job seekers, Pôle emploi . Our work tests the hypothesis that administration reforms have changed the role of statistics and accounting in policies. Based on observation of the counselors work and on interviews with executives of Pôle Emploi, this work sheds light on the mechanisms through which the central State measures its results on the labor market. Counselors undergo two different pressures: one derived from performance targets set by the State and the other from the increasing number of job seekers. The thesis analyzes the Arts and crafts developed by counselors to solve these tensions. From this perspective, the counselors work looks like a categorization activity enabling them to sort the 5.5 million unemployed in accordance with three separate scales: the labor law, the labor market, and the institutional solutions to improve employability. Counselors then experience contradictions between individualized activation policies and the macro-economic nature of the current number of unemployed. Thus, our work dissects the gap between great politicians addresses and civil servants feeling of powerlessness.NANTERRE-PARIS10-Bib. élec. (920509901) / SudocSudocFranceF