Digital Tendencies: Intuition, Algorithmic Thought and New Social Movements

With the rise of new digital, smart and algorithmic technologies, it is claimed, ‘the human’ is being fundamentally re-mediated. For some, this is problematic: digitally colonised by capitalism at the level of gesture, affect and habit, it is argued, we are now increasingly politically disaffected. There are also, however, more hopeful socio-political visions: Michel Serres (2015), for example, argues that, in delegating habits of mental processing and synthesising to digital technologies, millennials have honed cognitive conditions for a more ‘intuitive’ mode of being-in-the-world. While there is no necessary link between intuition and progressive social transformation, there are, this essay argues, significant resonances between the ‘intuitive digital subjects’ that Serres imagines and the logics and sensibilities of new networked social movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Vitally enabled by digital technologies, these activisms combine a tendency to oppose exploitation and oppression with a capacity to sense change as it is happening and thus remain radically open to alternative futures

Evidence and morality in harm-reduction debates: can we use value-neutral arguments to achieve value-driven goals?

It is common to argue that politicians make selective use of evidence to tacitly reinforce their moral positions, but all stakeholders combine facts and values to produce and use research for policy. The drug policy debate has largely been framed in terms of an opposition between evidence and politics. Focusing on harm reduction provides useful ground to discuss a further opposition proposed by evidence advocates, that between evidence and morality. Can evidence sway individuals from their existing moral positions, so as to “neutralise” morality? And if not, then should evidence advocates change the way in which they frame their arguments? To address these questions, analysis of N=27 interviews with stakeholders involved in drug policy and harm reduction research, advocacy, lobbying, implementation and decision-making in England, UK and New South Wales, Australia, was conducted. Participants’ accounts suggest that although evidence can help focus discussions away from values and principles, exposure to evidence does not necessarily change deeply held views. Whether stakeholders decide to go with the evidence or not seems contingent on whether they embrace a view of evidence as secular faith; a view that is shaped by experience, politics, training, and role. And yet, morality, values, and emotions underpin all stakeholders’ views, motivating their commitment to drug policy and harm reduction. Evidence advocates might thus benefit from morally and emotionally engaging audiences. This paper aims to develop better tools for analysing the role of morality in decision-making, starting with moral foundations theory. Using tools from disciplines such as moral psychology is relevant to the study of the politics of evidence-based policymaking

Management earnings forecasts and IPO performance: evidence of a regime change

Companies undertaking initial public offerings (IPOs) in Greece were obliged to include next-year profit forecast in their prospectuses, until the regulation changed in 2001 to voluntary forecasting. Drawing evidence from IPOs issued in the period 1993–2015, this is the first study to investigate the effect of disclosure regime on management earnings forecasts and IPO long-term performance. The findings show mainly positive forecast errors (forecasts are lower than actual earnings) and higher long-term returns during the mandatory period, suggesting that the mandatory disclosure requirement causes issuers to systematically bias profit forecasts downwards as they opt for the safety of accounting conservatism. The mandatory disclosure requirement artificially improves IPO share performance. Overall, our results show that mandatory disclosure of earnings forecasts can impede capital market efficiency once it goes beyond historical financial information to involve compulsory projections of future performance

Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation

Although we tend to associate social transformation with major events, historical turning points, or revolutionary upheaval, Revolutionary Routines argues that seemingly minor everyday habits are the key to meaningful change.Through its account of influential socio-political processes - such as the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy, the crafting of new technologies of governance, and the operation of digital media and algorithms - this book rethinks not only how change works, but also what counts as change. Drawing examples from the affective politics of Trumpism and Brexit, nudge theory and behaviour change, social media and the international refugee crisis, and the networked activism of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, Carolyn Pedwell argues that minor gestures may be as significant as major happenings, revealing the powerful potential in our ability to remake shared habits and imaginatively reinhabit everyday life.Revolutionary Routines offers a new understanding of the logics of habit and the nature of social change, power, and progressive politics, illustrating diverse forms of consciousness and co-operation through which political solidarities might take shape

Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (2004) [Book Review]

In their succinct introduction, Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford emphasize their desire to offer a critical exploration of third wave feminism, considering its complexities, possibilities and limitations. Their project is vital, and somewhat controversial, in an academic context in which third-wave feminism has generated widespread anxiety and hostility. Feminists aligning themselves with the second wave, in particular, have been quick to dismiss the purported emergence of a third wav

Hypertext and the Female Imaginary [Book review]

Whereas scholars once lauded the utopian possibilities of cyberspace to dissolve embodied markers of gender and race, Jaishree K. Odin argues that a paradigm shift is now required to bring attention back to ‘the embodied status of the human and the situated nature of experience’ (p. ix). Hence, in order to interrogate theoretical conventions that confine us to machinic, technorationalist constructions of the human (and the masculinist and Western-centric assumptions on which they often rely), Hypertext and the Female Imaginary contends that we need new ways of imagining being and subjectivity in all their complexity, fluidity and fragmentation—a task to which electronic media lends itself in extremely thought-provoking ways. This shift, the book suggests, involves conceptualising contemporary social life as a complex ‘topological space where different worlds intersect at different levels’ (p. ix), and where narrative spaces can be opened up for multiple ‘other’ stories to surface. It is this that both Odin and the female hypertext authors, artists and film-makers explored in her book do with considerable insight and ingenuity