The personal, the political and the popular: a woman's guide to celebrity politics

This article looks at articulations of gender, politics and citizenship by examining two European female heads of state: Tarja Halonen (Finland) and Angela Merkel (Germany). It discusses their personae in the context of emerging public debate about the merits and shortcomings of what is nowadays called ‘celebrity politics’, constituted by popularization and personalization. The analysis suggests that the increasing presence of popular culture in politics presents a complex and often unfavourable arena to women because of its inbuilt and extreme polarization of femininity and politics. It shows how Tarja Halonen and Angela Merkel have bypassed the personalization of politics and present a thoroughly political and professional persona to the public, rigidly concealing their private lives. As a result, female politicians - at least the two heads of state analysed here - tend to represent a classic ideal of political citizenship with clear boundaries and singular codes and conventions

Privacy concerns in smart cities

In this paper a framework is constructed to hypothesize if and how smart city technologies and urban big data produce privacy concerns among the people in these cities (as inhabitants, workers, visitors, and otherwise). The framework is built on the basis of two recurring dimensions in research about people's concerns about privacy: one dimensions represents that people perceive particular data as more personal and sensitive than others, the other dimension represents that people's privacy concerns differ according to the purpose for which data is collected, with the contrast between service and surveillance purposes most paramount. These two dimensions produce a 2 × 2 framework that hypothesizes which technologies and data-applications in smart cities are likely to raise people's privacy concerns, distinguishing between raising hardly any concern (impersonal data, service purpose), to raising controversy (personal data, surveillance purpose). Specific examples from the city of Rotterdam are used to further explore and illustrate the academic and practical usefulness of the framework. It is argued that the general hypothesis of the framework offers clear directions for further empirical research and theory building about privacy concerns in smart cities, and that it provides a sensitizing instrument for local governments to identify the absence, presence, or emergence of privacy concerns among their citizens

Do crying citizens make good citizens?

The present paper is framed within current debates about the need to rethink citizenship, especially with respect to the question of whether there is a legitimate place for emotion in the public sphere. Emotion has not traditionally been seen as a key to good citizenship, and there has been a fair amount of aversion among media critics towards the ‘‘emotionalization’’ of the public sphere and spectacular outbursts of public emotion. This paper looks at the coverage of the murders of Dutch filmmaker and journalist Theo van Gogh in 2004 and Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, and shows that the issue is not simply whether emotions should be allowed in the public sphere or not, but rather how they are articulated and how they achieve different understandings of citizenship.Peer reviewe

Writing from Experience

This article examines how weblog authors present their online gender identity, in order to establish how these modes of presentation fit into the research landscape about gender identity and computer-mediated communication (CMC). After a preliminary descriptive analysis of a sample of Dutch and Flemish weblogs, the authors conduct a qualitative content analysis of four of these `blogs'. They conclude that these weblog writers present their gender identity through narratives of `everyday life' that remain closely related to the binary gender system. However, their performance of `masculinity' and `femininity' is more diffuse and heterogeneous than some theories in the field of gender and CMC would assume. In addition, the act of diary writing on weblogs can be understood as challenging the masculine connotation of the weblog as an ICT, demonstrating that the use of a technology is pivotal in shaping the ways in which technologies themselves are conceived of as `masculine' or `feminine'

Data governance and citizen participation in the digital welfare state

U.S., UK, and European municipalities are increasingly experimenting with data as an instrument for social policy. This movement pertains often to the design of municipal data warehouses, dashboards, and predictive analytics, the latter mostly to identify risk of fraud. This transition to data-driven social policy, captured by the term “digital welfare state,” almost completely takes place out of political and social view, and escapes democratic decision making. In this article, I zoom in on The Netherlands and show in detail how sound data governance is lacking at three levels: data experiments and practices take place in a so-called “institutional void” without any clear democratic mandate; moreover, they are often based on disputable quality of data and analytic models; and they tend to transgress the recent EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) about privacy and data protection. I also assess that key stakeholders in this data transition, that is the citizens whose data are used, are not actively informed let alone invited to participate. As a result, a practice of top-down monitoring, containment and control is evolving despite the desire of civil servants in this domain to do “good” with data. I explore several data and policy alternatives in the conclusion to contribute to a higher quality and more democratic usage of data in the digital welfare state

Trends in political television fiction in the UK: themes, characters and narratives, 1965-2009

British television has a long tradition of broadcasting ‘political fiction’ if this is understood as telling stories about politicians in the form of drama, thrillers and comedies. We identify and discuss three genres in which UK political TV fiction has been shaped throughout the decades: comedy, thriller and drama. We examine the characters, themes and narratives in these genres and assess whether they invite political engagement from their audiences. Across time and genre, the main characters turn out to be mostly plain men of uncertain age – around 40 or over – somewhat grumpy, somewhat clumsy and hardly ever in full control of their situation. The dominant themes across time and genre link closely to these types of main characters: in most thrillers they are overwhelmed by sinister outside forces or inside political machinations. The narrative of the political machinery that exerts its inescapable corruption over all individual politicians runs strongly through the three genres across the whole time period. A further similarity across time and genre is that most series are firmly linked to real-life politics. It is this particular aspect that produces their potential relevance for affecting people’s political understandings, judgements and engagement

Giving Meaning to RFID and Cochlear Implants:Technology as tool, the normal self, and the enhanced self

RFID implants are controversial for their potential use in society. However, as the social shaping of technology predicts, technology itself is not inherently good or bad; it is important how the technology is used. Through an ongoing process of giving meaning to a technology, people incorporate a technology into their lives and in this sense ‘domesticate’ it. Using semi-structured interviews with people with a cochlear implant (CI) and do-it-yourselfers with a RFID implant, this study sheds light on the meaning individuals give to their implants. Three repertoires were found among my respondents: technology as a tool, the normal self, and the enhanced self. CI-users perceive the implant as a tool to be able to hear and participate in society. This study shows that the CI-users desire a body that functions as it normally should because they want to participate in society. The CI is a means to achieve this normalization and the fact that it is implanted rather than attached to the body is generally of minor concern. The RFID tagged persons can also perceive their implant as a tool, but attach different meanings to it. Whereas the CI-users want to blend in society, some RFID implantees use their implant to stand out. Some RFID implantees perceive themselves as upgraded and welcome a tighter integration of technology and their bodies. Moreover, believing in an enhanced self corresponds with wanting to modify the human body to improve the body’s capacity. This shows that desiring human enhancement is not only about the exact details of the enhancement, but also about the mere fact of being enhanced