"Actor-Network Theory and Crime Studies: Explorations in Science and Technology" ed. by Dominique Rober

In crime control and criminal justice, science and technology are relied on to establish guilt, develop preventive policies, track suspects, and much more. This raises questions as to how facts about criminal behaviour are established, how surveillance technologies spread and how crime prevention affects everyday experiences. To answer such questions, the editors of Actor-Network Theory and Crime Studies propose, crime studies need to move beyond critical constructionist approaches. Dominique Robert and Martin Dufresne argue that these approaches have in too many cases led to studies that critique and even ‘debunk’ without giving satisfactory accounts of how science and technology affect legal and policing practices and vice versa. [...

Data Mining 'Problem Youth'

This chapter examines how a Dutch city attempted to use data mining to profile 'problem youth'. It challenges zooming as the metaphor that guides the use of this statistical technique. To see something from close by, it is argued, is a situated practice. Instead of presenting the object in more detail, a new object is brought into being. Two modes of situated improvisation are identified. These involve the interplay of artefacts, bodies of knowledge, and normativities. Attending to metaphors in practice may thus be a useful starting point to change the terms by which digital identities are produced. Key words: algorithms, big data, statistics, digital identity, materiality, vision, surveillanc

Surveillance in the Supermarket

In 2007, a city in the Netherlands provided a shop owner with a facial recognition system to detect known shop thieves. This camera system compared faces of individuals in the crowd with police photos of known local shoplifters. In this paper, I ask how facial recognition intervenes in the relations between the various actors involved in monitoring and controlling shop crime. In particular, I focus on how technology affects the pluralisation of surveillance, understood here as the state’s effort to mobilise new types of actors. By studying surveillance as a situated practice of making shoplifters visible, I show how facial recognition was in this case part of an effort to further enlist the supermarket in monitoring petty crime. I furthermore attend to the contingencies of this process. While surveillance technologies can potentially engage new actors, they do not necessarily do so as they may refuse to take part in a particular mode of surveillance. In other words, not only subjects of surveillance resist, resistances may also exist within the networks that perform surveillance

Doing statistics, enacting the nation: the performative powers of categories

It has been widely acknowledged in debates about nationalism and ethnicity that identity categories used for classifying people along the lines of culture, race and ethnicity help to enact, that is bring into being, the collective identities they name. However, we know little about how categories acquire their performative powers. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, it proposes a conceptual framework based on concepts and insights from science and technology studies (STS) for investigating the performative powers of statistical identity categories and possibly also other domains. Second, it demonstrates, through an empirical study of two examples in Estonian and Dutch official population statistics, that statistical identity categories enact more than the groups to which they refer. We argue that they also enact national identities and notions of national belonging of majoritarian groups in the host countries. Therefore, statistical identity categories can be used as analytical lenses to study nationalisms and processes of nation-building

Imagining Citizens as More than Data Subjects: A Methodography of a Collaborative Design Workshop on Co-producing Official Statistics

The article presents a methodography of a collaborative design workshop conducted with national and international statisticians. The workshop was part of an ethnographic research project on innovation in European official statistics. It aimed to bring academic researchers and statisticians together to collaborate on the design of app prototypes that imagine citizens as co-producers of official statistics rather than only data subjects. However, the objective was not to settle on an end product but to see if relations to citizens could be re-imagined. Through a methodography composed of two ethnographic narratives, we analyse whether and how a collaborative design workshop brought about imaginings of citizens as co-producers. To retrospectively analyse the workshop, we draw on feminist and material-semiotic takes on ‘friction’ as characteristic of collaboration. ‘Friction’, we suggest, can enlarge the repertoire of collaborative speculative practice beyond notions of rupture or consensus. Finally, we suggest that this analysis demonstrates the potential of methodography for opening up and reflecting on method in STS through eliciting the possibilities of collaboration