Revolutionary Love: Ferguson Uprising, A Love Story

This thesis addresses the dimensions of what protestors in Ferguson refer to as “revolutionary love,” an affective force expressed and enacted in the streets. Answering the skepticism and dismissal of love in politics, I first examine the tradition of love in radical Black political thought, as well as somewhat more recent turns to love in feminist, queer and affect theory. Turning to diverse sources of coverage on protests against police brutality, including press coverage of Black Lives Matter the organization, the self-critical archive available via Ferguson activists’ use of Twitter, and participant observation in protests in and around Ferguson, Missouri. Using both words and actions, I examine how movement actors define and use love in moments of uncertainty and risk. This love, I argue, has certain key components: constituting the movement, continuing the movement through certain practices (care labor and solidarity) and struggling in the face of both internal and external pressures. Moreover, it performs certain functions in linking protestors together in defiance of the white supremacist state

Proceedings of the Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2020

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2020). This edition of the conference is held in Bologna and organised by the University of Bologna. The CLiC-it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after six years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Collective attention in online social networks

Social media is an ever-present tool in modern society, and its widespread usage positions it as a valuable source of insights into society at large. The study of collective attention in particular is one application that benefits from the scale of social media data. In this thesis we will investigate how collective attention manifests on social media and how it can be understood. We approach this challenge from several perspectives across network and data science. We first focus on a period of increased media attention to climate change to see how robust the previously observed polarised structures are under a collective attention event. Our experiments will show that while the level of engagement with the climate change debate increases, there is little disruption to the existing polarised structure in the communication network. Understanding the climate media debate requires addressing a methodological concern about the most effective method for weighting bipartite network projections with respect to the accuracy of community detection. We test seven weighting schemes on constructed networks with known community structure and then use the preferred methodology we identify to study collective attention in the climate change debate on Twitter. Following on from this, we will investigate how collective attention changes over the course of a single event over a longer period, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. We measure how the disruption to in-person social interactions as a consequence of attempts to limit the spread of COVID-19 in England and Wales have affected social interaction patterns as they appear on Twitter. Using a dataset of tweets with location tags, we will see how the spatial attention to locations and collective attention to discussion topics are affected by social distancing and population movement restrictions in different stages of the pandemic. Finally we present a new analysis framework for collective attention events that allows direct comparisons across different time and volume scales, such as those seen in the climate change and COVID-19 experiments. We demonstrate that this approach performs better than traditional approaches that rely on binning the timeseries at certain resolutions and comment on the mechanistic properties highlighted by our new methodology.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

The Pragmatics of Hope: Class, Elections and Political Management in Contemporary Colombia.

This dissertation examines the recent introduction of U.S.-style, image-based political management techniques into Colombian politics, a phenomenon facilitated by the comprehensive market and political reforms of the 1990s. The Colombian elites who favored these reforms hoped to dismantle the clientelistic networks of private interests that, in their view, perpetuated a corrupt, ineffective, and at times, collusive two-party system. They hoped that a multi-party system would provide Colombian voters with real political choice. However, despite these efforts, clientelism continues to thrive under the new regime. With party/faction loyalty no longer the dominant driver in elections, campaigns now hire political managers to guide voters’ choices based on individual candidates’ appeal. Ironically, these practices have created “electoral industries,” networks of voters organized around political figures as opposed to party platforms. These electoral industries have easily adapted to existing clientelistic networks, the very networks the reforms were meant to dismantle. Meanwhile, through the language of market segmentation, political elites have publicly moralized clientelism’s resilience, characterizing it as a persistent, anti-modern behavior that can be objectively correlated with lower class voters. Their portrait of clientelism stands in stark contrast to the liberal political subjectivity (grounded in individual choice) that they attribute to urban middle and upper classes. According to these ideas, political managers mobilize specific technologies meant to more effectively manage each kind of vote. While lower class voters are managed through face-to-face networks and informal channels of communication, middle and upper class voters are reached through broadcast media and web-based social media. By looking at the institutional platforms, expert knowledge, political technologies and normative political ideas at work in the organization of these environments for political participation, my work explores the features of liberalism that allow clientelism and media-based politics to coexist, and even thrive, under a single system. Specifically, I trace the emergence of a form of “strategic citizenship,” to borrow Partha Chatterjee’s term, that I argue is the latest guise that the transactional dimensions of liberalism has taken

Engaged Humanities

What is the role of the humanities at the start of 21st century? In the last few decades, the various disciplines of the humanities (history, linguistics, literary studies, art history, media studies) have encountered a broad range of challenges, related to the future of print culture, to shifts in funding strategies, and to the changing contours of culture and society. Several publications have addressed these challenges as well as potential responses on a theoretical level. This coedited volume opts for a different strategy and presents accessible case studies that demonstrate what humanities scholars contribute to concrete and pressing social debates about topics including adoption, dementia, hacking, and conservation. These “engaged” forms of humanities research reveal the continued importance of thinking and rethinking the nature of art, culture, and public life

Virtual cosmopolitics and global ethics: an analysis of transnational global justice movements across social media networks

Global ethics in recent scholarship has been understood in largely substantive terms as constituting a normative set of political principles, cultural values and religious moral imperatives. It has thus been commonly understood as a type of strong moral universalism with prescriptive moral frameworks rooted in foundational principles. In contrast, this thesis understands a global ethics in sociocognitive terms in ways of thinking, feeling and acting; it is found in a moral consciousness of the need for an ethics on a planetary scale which is articulated in emotional responses to global issues within critical publics throughout the world and embodied in ethico-political practices that shape common struggles around a global justice politics that extends beyond national frames of reference. By this understanding, its conceptual indicators can be seen in discourses of co-responsibility emerging around perceived global threats that can generate social bonds in transnational solidarities and collective-identities. Understood through the normative perspective of critical cosmopolitanism, this study examines a global ethics—as emerging out of a critical way of seeing the world, in moral evaluations and critical diagnoses of social conditions—articulated in cross-national political projects which are digitally mediated in social media networks. There has been scarce scholarship on the relationship between digital technology and a global ethics—a gap this thesis fills by focusing on the way in which global ethics today arises within interactive, creative and collaborative digital spaces built across social media networks. Despite its imbrication in new digital systems of exploitation, domination and surveillance capitalism, the central argument of this thesis is that social media networks open digital spaces integral to expressions of a post-traditional ethics today: as a new global communications ecology, they have (a) heightened our sense of moralpractical reflection toward the non-human world and the universe of distant others and (b) offered digital symbolic spaces within which to build collective action frames in response to global risk through building shared antagonisms, common meanings and radical imaginaries of alternative futures which can mobilise collective actions, in multiple urban spaces, across the globe. To support this central argument, the thesis draws on the recent cross-national cases of digital activism in response to global problems in the form of the Occupy Everywhere, Friday- For-Futures and Global Frackdown movements. These movements exhibited network practices that displayed social, symbolic and cognitive articulations of a cosmopolitan citizenship

Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing

Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions. On the other hand, the term cognitive computing is generally used to refer to new hardware and/or software that mimics the functioning of the human brain and helps to improve human decision-making. In this sense, it is a type of computing with the goal of discovering more accurate models of how the human brain/mind senses, reasons, and responds to stimuli. Socio-Cognitive Computing should be understood as a set of theoretical interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, methods and hardware/software tools to model how the human brain mediates social interactions. In addition, Affective Computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects, a fundamental aspect of socio-cognitive neuroscience. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, electrical engineering, psychology, and cognitive science. Physiological Computing is a category of technology in which electrophysiological data recorded directly from human activity are used to interface with a computing device. This technology becomes even more relevant when computing can be integrated pervasively in everyday life environments. Thus, Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing systems should be able to adapt their behavior according to the Physiological Computing paradigm. This book integrates proposals from researchers who use signals from the brain and/or body to infer people's intentions and psychological state in smart computing systems. The design of this kind of systems combines knowledge and methods of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, as well as physiological data measurement and processing, with those of socio-cognitive and affective computing