Roundup: PhD Back to the Future Symposium

On 2 May, PhD researchers connected to the Governing the Digital Society PhD Network presented their research and work to colleagues and interested attendees during the GDS PhD Back to the Future symposium. Organizer Karin van Es shared opening remarks and introduced the Focus Area Governing the Digital Society.

The presentations were clustered in three different sessions: Algorithmization in public sector organizations, chaired by Erna Ruijer, Algorithms, morals and ethics, chaired by Bruce Mutsvairo, and Online platforms, chaired by Machiko Kanetake. The short presentations were followed by intriguing discussions and questions. After the symposium, the conversations were effortlessly continued during drinks! Below, you can read a short recap of the symposium.

Algorithmization in public sector organizations

Jacob van de Kerkhof is a researcher with the Montaigne Centre and Molengraaff. His research focuses on the legal protection of freedom of expression of users on social media platforms. His thesis compares the legal embedding of freedom of expression in the relationship between user and platform in Germany and the United States. In this comparative exercise, it aims to identify measures that best ensure the freedom of expression of the collective, and provide enough procedural safeguards for the right to expression of the individual.

Lukas Lorenz works as a PhD student at the Utrecht School of Governance. His thesis explores the adoption of machine-learning algorithms in public organizations through the case of a Dutch regulatory agency. It analyzes how actors from different positions in the organization engage with the algorithm and how issues, such as ownership, quality, and rules, lead to a decoupling between algorithms and organizational practice.

Carlos Soares works for the Netherlands Police. In his presentation he explored a case where police officers are trying to work with a new technological system. Specifically, he focused on the research design for this case. In what way does the new system afford or constraint (Leonardi 2011) them in the performance of a task? Moreover, how does an algorithm influence the discretionary leeway of a civil servant?

Algorithms, morals and ethics

Rosa Wevers is a NWO-funded PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Utrecht University. Her interdisciplinary project analyses how contemporary art exhibitions confront visitors with critical perspectives on surveillance and engage them in strategies of resistance. Analyzing an art exhibition around surveillance she shows how through exhibition design and curatorial strategies, the exhibition prompts reflection on ‘the securitization of identity’ (Rose, 1999; Currah and Mulqueen, 2011) and denormalise the pressure of transparency (Blas and Gaboury 2016, Glissant 1997) that results from this process of securitization. The exhibition, moreover, is approached as potential drivers of ‘care against technological carelessness’.

Gerwin van Schie is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. He is a researcher of the NWO-funded project “Datafication of Race and Ethnicity in the Netherlands: Investigating Practices, Politics and Appropriation of Governmental Open Data”. His presentation investigated the racialized construction of Dutchness and its entanglement with contemporary datafied technologies through a prominent artwork in the royal palace that visualizes parts of the DNA of the Dutch royal family. He argued that the process of datafication plays a dual role in the social acceptance of the racial construction of Dutchness at the site under investigation. First, it makes the process appear as an objective treatment of biological and cultural human characteristics. Second, datafication actively disconnects contemporary practices of racialization from Dutch histories of colonialism and racism.

Viktorija Morozovaite is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the public economic law chair group of the Law Department. In her research project ‘Hypernudging strategies in the digital market economy: a role for European competition law?’ she works on conceptualizing novel hypernudging processes and examines them in relation to Art.102 TFEU. Her presentation introduced the emerging voice intelligence industry, its market structure, and the potential for consumer (potentially anticompetitive) influencing. It answered the research question - whether European competition law can address the potential challenges related to hypernudging by voice assistants, justifying its relevance and drawing parallels with anticompetitive self-preferencing behaviour.

Online platforms

Duan Shichang is a PhD candidate in school of journalism at Renmin University of China. His research covers a wide range of subjects including science and technology studies, infrastructure studies, labor studies and mobility studies. His presentation addressed the questions: What kind of entrepreneurial labor e-commerce sellers is performing in rural China? How do they perceive entrepreneurial labor? Does platformization allow them to gain new subjectivities? Deploying the analytic of platformization of cultural production, he finds that the urban-rural dualistic tradition launched by the state and the internal dynamism of platform ecosystem together constitute the political and market conditions, facilitating the rise of rural entrepreneurial labor.

Tim de Winkel is a PhD-candidate at the media and culture department of the Utrecht University and affiliated with the Utrecht Data School and research platform Datafied Society. Tim’s dissertation investigates radical platform technology and its role in online communication and information practices of the contemporary platform society. In his presentation he theorized whether so-called Alt-Tech infrastructures for (online) participation and dissemination constitute a new pillar in our platformized public sphere, and whether a consociational model can function as a theoretical template for a more open web, or that ideological segmentation fosters further polarization.

Sérgio Barbosa is a PhD candidate linked to the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra and a FCT fellow (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology): SFRH/BD/143495/2019. In his presentation he argues that a new type of political activist is emerging amongst contemporary social mobilizations: the WhatsApper, a digital activist who intensely appropriates the chat app leveraging its app affordances for participation in political life.