Issue-Orientated Activism: comparing the emergence of concerned groups around care policies for dependent people in UK and Spain
Catalan Research Council. Beatriu de Pinós Postdoctoral Fellowship.
This project analyses and compares two political situations: the launch of the "Act on Dependency", an important and controversial social policy approved in 2006 by the Spanish Government with the aim of guaranteeing public support for people who cannot lead independent lives for reasons of illness, disability or age; and the austerity programme (also known as "the cuts"), promoted in 2010 by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government of the United Kingdom as a way to tackle the UK's budget deficit. Both episodes have given rise to huge public debates and they are still highly contested reforms. For this reason, they are both good scenarios where to study and compare the raising, development and transformation of political activism. Particularly around issues regarding social care, disability, independent living policies and ageing in contemporary societies. In this context, the aim of the project is to map those forms of activism and analyze their actions, strategies and mechanisms of participation. As such, the project aims to contribute to ongoing discussions opened up in Science and Technology Studies about the "objects" of politics and the processes/practices mediating political participation/mobilization.
The project is led by Dr. Israel Rodríguez-Giralt.
Professor dels Estudis de Psicologia i
Ciències de l'Educació
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)
Rambla del Poble Nou, 156
08018 Barcelona
Visiting Fellow (2010-2012)
Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process
Energy & Co-Designing Communities
RCUK Energy and Communities Programme
http://www.ecdc.ac.uk/
How might new technologies be designed to engage communities in reducing energy consumption? Domestic energy use remains relatively high, and this project addresses how the UK can achieve its intention to make an 80% reduction of the country’s carbon emissions by 2050.
By working across communities, ECDC will bring together a range of perspectives and knowledge on how to reduce energy demand. Based on ongoing dialogue, we will design technological prototypes to support or inform alternative energy practices. Volunteers will have the opportunity to test these prototypes in their homes and community spaces. The designs will not be intended to directly support participants’ current projects, but will help to open up new ways of thinking about and engaging with energy reduction.
The project team includes: Mike Michael, Jennifer Gabrys, Bill Gaver, Alex Wilkie, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovalle
Organising disaster: Civil Protection and the Population
European Research Council, Starting Grant
When disasters hit, the state sends specialised organisations to cope with the situation. These organisations are often hierarchical and they have great powers to re-organize the population, to tell people where to go, to give or withhold both material and other forms of help. Disaster situations are thus in many ways pre-structured by the programmes of these organisations and how they conceptualize the population.
Michael Guggenheim seeks to analyze in his project „Organizing Disaster: Civil Protection and the Population“ the encounter between civil protection as state organisation and the population. What happens when civil protection encounters the population in case of disasters? How does civil protection conceive of the population and how does it influence what happens in case of disasters? Is the population seen as uniform or as composed of different groups? How are these groups addressed? Does civil protection simply attempt to restore a previous state or change society into a given direction? How does the population conceive of civil protection in turn?
By drawing on Science and Technology Studies civil protection is analysed as a knowledge-based, organised attempt to order society with the help of various technologies. The project seeks to answer the above questions by combining document analysis of civil protection manuals, participant observation of civil protection trainings and qualitative interviews in the aftermath of flood-disasters. The empirical fields are England, Switzerland and India, to allow for comparison of different forms of centralization and professionalization of civil protection organisations.
Issue Mapping: Demonstrating the Relevance for Participatory Social Research
ESRC Digital Social Research Demonstrator Project
Issue mapping offers a set of digital tools, methods, and techniques for the analysis of current affairs. An active research community is currently emerging around this approach in the UK as well as internationally, as three platforms for issue mapping have come online in recent years: Issuecrawler, demoscience.org and Mapping Controversies. These web-based platforms make available a range of applications and guidelines for the online location, analysis and visualisation of issues. They offer a distinctive approach to digital social research insofar as they enable forms of 'realtime' research: the online analysis of dynamic content. Issue mapping also entails a participatory approach to social research, as it combines computing techniques with social methods and the design of visual outputs. Methods of issue mapping are currently used in both academic research in leading social science departments as well as by organisations active in issue advocacy, design research and social technology. This project seeks to develop the contribution of issue mapping to digital social research, by enabling exchange among these diverse users and developers of issue mapping. More specifically, its aim is to identify, facilitate and communicate the contribution of issue analysis to the development of participatory and real-time methods of digital social research.
In order to identify, facilitate and elaborate the use of issue mapping platforms in digital social research, this project will host two workshops, which will bring together existing and new users and developers of issue mapping with four different competency profiles: social research, creative computing, issue advocacy, and visual design. The participation of representatives of each of these four competency groupings is crucial to explicate and develop the contribution of issue mapping to methodological innovation in digital social research. During the workshops small groupings will explore specific related questions in issue mapping projects: what research needs does and can issue mapping fulfil? how does issue mapping re-distribute analytical competencies among devices, analysts and objects of social analysis? What visualisation tactics are relevant and effective for issue mapping?The project is led by Dr Noortje Marres. Ms Carolin Gerlitz works on the project as a researcher.