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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.

Big data and citizens are inseparable: from smartphones, meters, fridges and cars to internet platforms, the data of most digital technologies is the data of citizens. In addition to raising political and ethical issues of privacy, confidentiality and data protection, the repurposing of big data calls for rethinking relations to citizens in the production of official statistics if they are to be trusted. I argue for relations that involve co-producing data – or ‘citizen data’ – where citizens are engaged in statistical production, from the design of a data production platform to the interpretation and analysis of data. While raising issues such as data quality, I suggest that in a time of ‘alternative facts’, what constitutes legitimate knowledge and expertise are major political sites of contention and struggle and require going beyond defending existing practices towards inventing new ones. In this light, the future of official statistics not only depends on inventing new data sources and methods but also mobilizing the possibilities of digital technologies to establish new relations with citizens.

Introduction to an edited special issue (SI) based on presentations at a workshop, Peopling ‘Europe’ through Data Practices, organized by the members of the ARITHMUS project as part of the study of how methodological changes in the production of population statistics within the EU affect the enactment of populations as objects of government. The contributions study data practices through which the people of Europe are enumerated, classified, narrated, quantified, territorialized, visualized and imagined into being as knowable categories of people, such as citizens, workers, consumers, travellers, minorities, and so on.

The political integration of the European Union (EU) is fragile for many reasons, not least the reassertion of nationalism. That said, if we examine specific practices and infrastructures, a more complicated story emerges. We juxtapose the political fragility of the EU in relation to the ongoing formation of data infrastructures in official statistics that take part in postnational enactments of Europe’s populations and territories. We develop this argument by analyzing transformations in how European populations are enacted through new technological infrastructures that seek to integrate national census data in “cubes” of cross-tabulated social topics and spatial “grids” of maps. In doing so, these infrastructures give meaning to what “is” Europe in ways that are both old and new. Through standardization and harmonization of social and geographical spaces, “old” geometries of organizing and mapping populations are deployed along with “new” topological arrangements that mix and fold categories of population. Furthermore, we consider how grids and cubes are generative of methodological topologies by closing the distances or differences between methods and making their data equivalent. By paying attention to these practices and infrastructures, we examine how they enable reconfiguring what is known and imagined as Europe and how it is governed.

Data has become a social and political issue not only because it concerns anyone who is connected to the Internet but also because it reconfigures relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. Just about every device is now connected to the Internet and generating vast quantities of digital traces about interactions, transactions and movements whether users are aware or not. What started as an ostensibly liberated space the Internet rapidly became the space over and through which governments and corporations began collecting, storing, retrieving, analysing, and producing data that analyses what people do and say on the Internet. This ranges from who communicates with whom, who goes where, and who says what – and much more besides. This is now being augmented with data that people produce about themselves, especially their relations, body movements and measurements; the amount and range of data that has become available is, as everyone now knows, staggering. This chapter introduces the main themes of the book to position these developments within a broad historical-sociological perspective and to articulate an international political sociology of data politics.

In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and identify and evaluate the performance of individuals and populations. Under the UK’s New Labour government, the development of such devices was part of a broader policy known as ‘joined-up thinking and government’. Analyses of this policy have typically understood joining up as an operation of adding together distributed data about subjects, which can then be used in the service of government surveillance, the database state or informational capitalism. But rather than such technical or managerialist analytics, I argue that topological analytics capture what these database devices enact and do: they materialize the ‘individuality’ of subjects in intensified, distributed and fluctuating ways and materialize and intensify a logic of what Deleuze describes as modulating controls. Through examples of UK New Labour social policy initiatives over the past decade, I argue that topological analytics can account for these as immanent rather than exceptional properties of database devices and, as such, part and parcel of a governmental logic and ontology of subjects.

Much of social and political life is now conducted through the Internet and social and power relations are ever more entwined with digital life. How might digital sociology then attend to fundamental sociological questions of power and subjectivity as people variously act through the Internet? There are of course many studies of how the Internet is remaking sociality, social networks, publics, politics, identities, subjectivities, or human-technology interactions. In various ways, they attend to how the Internet is altering relations not only between people but also between people and vast arrangements of sociotechnical conventions that have become part of everyday language, such as tweeting, messaging, friending, emailing, blogging, sharing, and so on. Interpreting the digital data that these ‘registers of action’ generate and their different forms of subjectivity represent an interpretive challenge for digital sociology and its emerging digital methods. In response to this challenge, I offer a conceptual framing that starts from Bruno Latour’s account of ‘how to do words with things’ to interpret the various ways that subjects ‘do words with things of the Internet’. The framing builds on the formulation that when subjects act they perform different subject positions that are composites of obedience, submission, and subversion. I then focus on subjects who perform digital acts by subverting conventions of the Internet to make rights claims and in doing so bring a political subjectivity called the digital citizen into being.

Politically, Europe has been unable to address itself to a constituted polity and people as more than an agglomeration of nation-states. From the resurgence of nationalisms to the crisis of the single currency and the unprecedented decision of a member state to leave the European Union (EU), core questions about the future of Europe have been rearticulated: Who are the people of Europe? Is there a European identity? What does it mean to say, “I am European?” Where does Europe begin and end? and Who can legitimately claim to be a part of a “European” people? The special issue (SI) seeks to contest dominant framings of the question “Who are the people of Europe?” as only a matter of government policies, electoral campaigns, or parliamentary debates. Instead, the contributions start from the assumption that answers to this question exist in data practices where people are addressed, framed, known, and governed as European. The central argument of this SI is that it is through data practices that the EU seeks to simultaneously constitute its population as a knowable, governable entity, and as a distinct form of peoplehood where common personhood is more important than differences.

Beck and Sznaider call on ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology studies, we depart from some conceptual presuppositions of methodological cosmopolitanism to define a ‘transversal method’. Referring to this method as performative and ontopolitical, we reflect on how it requires collaboration and, in our ethnography, gave rise to three practical challenges – (1) going beyond the individual project; (2) using each other's field notes; (3) and working against the national order of things. To meet these challenges, we reflect on how this method required us to practise three modes of care – thinking with others, tinkering with field notes, and dissenting within.

Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and the emergence of new actors promising to produce more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as “big data.” This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods become legitimate and official? We approach this question by conceiving of official statistics as part of a transnational field in which different factions of actors compete and struggle over the authority to innovate the data and methods that are legitimated to produce official statistics. We consider these struggles as a politics of method that is not reducible to a competition between ideas and words. They are also material insofar as they feature competing digital devices mobilized to demonstrate the validity of new data and methods. Through two empirical examples, we identify the strategy of reassembling methods to capture how statisticians tame and contain innovations based on big data, especially those introduced by data scientists, by integrating and simultaneously subordinating them to existing methods. By doing so, we suggest that reassembling is an innovation strategy that secures the relative position of national and international statisticians within the transnational field of statistics.

The chapter examines the various ways that data captures and colonizes minds, souls, bodies and spaces and makes data subjects through practices of production, accumulation, aggregation, circulation, valuation, and interpretation. We draw attention to how these practices operate together yet differently in the metropole and postcolony and produce different data subjects. By first describing how European empires in the nineteenth century invented various data collection and analysis methods for producing colonial populations, the chapter outlines how postcolonial practices build on these imperial infrastructures and logics. Through the example of the UN’s Global Pulse initiative as an instance of postcolonial data politics, the chapter argues for decolonising data politics.

The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented questions about the increasing datafication of international relations and politics. First, it proposes a way of conceptualizing big data that is broad enough to open fruitful investigations into the emerging use of big data in these contexts. This conceptualization includes the identification of three moments contained in any big data practice. Secondly, it suggests a research agenda built around a set of sub-themes that each deserve dedicated scrutiny when studying the interplay between big data and international relations along these moments. Through a combination of these moments and sub-themes, the paper suggests a roadmap for an international political sociology of the datafication of worlds.

We develop the concept of methods as ‘forces of subjectivation’ in relation to experiments we have encountered in a study of government methods for generating official population statistics. These experiments problematise the subjects of traditional methods based on paper questionnaires and offer new digital technologies and data sources as possible solutions. We reflect on these experiments in relation to recent work on sociological and digital research methods as inventive and live. What this work identifies in relation to questions of research methods we take up to think about government methods in two ways. One concerns how government method experiments offered as solutions to problematic subjects, once put into action, change initial problem formulations and are inventive of new ones. Secondly, they are also inventive of their subjects who do not pre-exist but come into being through the agential capacities that methods configure. Both aspects of methods, we argue, are the result of the interactions and dynamics between human and technological actors, the outcomes of which cannot be settled in advance.

From smartphones, meters, fridges and cars to internet platforms, the data of digital technologies are the data of citizens. In addition to raising political and ethical issues of privacy, confidentiality and data protection, this calls for rethinking relations to citizens in the production of data for statistics if they are to be trusted by citizens. We outline an approach that involves co-producing data with citizens as partners of statistical production, from the design of a data production platform to the interpretation and analysis of data. While raising issues such as data quality and reliability, we argue co-production can potentially mitigate problems associated with the re-purposing of Big Data. We argue that in a time of “ alternative facts”, what constitutes legitimate knowledge and expertise are major political sites of contention and struggle and require going beyond defending existing practices towards inventing new ones. In this context, we contend that the future of official statistics not only depends on inventing new data sources and methods but also mobilising the possibilities of digital technologies to establish new relations with citizens., Ruppert Evelyn, Grommé Francisca, Ustek-Spilda Funda, Cakici Baki. Citizen Data and Trust in Official Statistics. In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°505-506, 2018. Big Data and Statistics (Part 1) pp. 171-184.

There is a long history of governments, businesses, science and citizens producing and utilizing data in order to monitor, regulate, profit from, and make sense of the urban world. Data have traditionally been time-consuming and costly to generate, analyse and interpret, and generally have provided static, often coarse, snapshots of urban phenomena. Recently, however, we have entered the age of big data, with data related to knowing and governing cities increasingly becoming a deluge; a wide, deep torrent of timely, varied, resolute and relational data (Kitchin 2014a; Batty 2016). This has been accompanied by an opening up of state data, and to a much lesser degree, business data, the production of volunteered geographic information, and the emergence of open data cultures and practices (Goodchild 2007; Bates 2012). As a result, evermore aspects of everyday life - work, consumption, travel, communication, leisure - and the worlds we inhabit are being captured and stored as data, made sense of through new data analytics, mediated through data-driven technologies, normalized through data-driven infrastructures, and shared through data infrastructures and data brokers (Amoore 2013; Kitchin 2014b; Offenhuber and Ratti 2014).

The article explores the politics of making worlds legible, transparent and actionable through devices that governments and international organizations mobilize in the quest to achieve moral certainty about their activities and decisions. Through an analysis of three distinct examples, we examine the effects of such attempts to open things up in the name of the public good: the performance metrics that are part of the UK government's 'Transparency Agenda’; ‘conflict mapping’ as part of Kyrgyzstan’s internationally-sponsored programmes of Preventive Development; and the procedures of Peru’s National System of Public Investment (SNIP) through which public investments are regulated. We explore these three as instances of what we call ‘transparency devices’. It is to past moral failures—of wrongdoing, conflict or corruption—that these devices react and consequently it is the anticipation of future moral failings towards which they are then oriented. Each device does so by establishing matters of fact as moral certainties through technical settlements carried out in ‘public.’ But in their enactment of social realities, such devices are also generative of what we call collateral effects and affects. First, technical settlements require establishing what is to be included/excluded but such stabilizations are only fleeting, always and already partial, and provisional. As such rather than alleviating uncertainty they come to amplify it. Furthermore, while they can be understood as neoliberal techniques of producing active, rational witnessing subjects who take responsibility for ensuring moral futures, they are also generative of affective dispositions of suspicion and hypervigilance; fostering subjects with a greater awareness of that which is yet to be revealed. We suggest that these effects and affects should not be considered weaknesses, but rather that uncertainty and hypervigilant responsibilised subjects call for the continuation of more of the same and thus are a source of the very authority and legitimacy of transparency devices.

The collection focuses on ‘the device’ to explore how methods for knowing and handling the world have their own social life or even triple social life: how they are shaped by the social;work to format social relations; but also how they are used opportunistically by social actors in the systematic pursuit of political, economic and cultural advantage.

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence.

How might we think differently? This book is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors are all interested in non-standard modes of knowing. They are all more or less uneasy with the restrictions or the agendas implied by academic modes of knowing, and they have chosen to do this by working with, through, or against one important Western alternative – that of the baroque. Why the baroque? One answer is that the baroque made space for and fostered many forms of otherness. It involved knowing things differently, extravagantly, excessively, and in materially heterogeneous ways, and it apprehended that which is other and could not be caught in a cognitive or symbolic net. It also involved knowing in ways that did not gather into a single point, and knew itself to be performative. A part of a great Western division between rationalist and non-rationalist modes of knowing, the baroque is therefore a possible resource for creating ways of knowing differently, a storehouse of possible alternative techniques. To say this is not to say that it is the right mode of knowing. The book’s authors do not seek to create a ‘baroque social science’ whatever that might be, but instead work in a range of ways to explore how drawing on the ‘resources of the baroque’ can help us to think differently.

In spring 2009, revelations over the expense claims of British MPs led to one of the most damaging scandals affecting the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy in recent history. This article explores how this incident reveals the capacity of Web 2.0 devices and transactional data to transform politics. It reflects, graphically, the political power of identifying and knowing people on the basis of their transactions, on what they do rather than what they say. It also shows in practice how Web 2.0 devices such as Crowdsourcing, Google Docs, mash-ups and visualization software can be used to mobilize data for collective and popular projects. Basic analytic tools freely available on the Web enable people to access, digitize and analyse data and do their own analyses and representations of phenomena. We examine media and popular mobilizations of transactional data using the specific example of the MPs' expenses scandal and relate this to larger currents in online government data and devices for public scrutiny which give rise to a new politics of measurement. We argue that this politics of measurement involves the introduction of new visual devices based on the manipulation of huge databases into simplified visual arrays; the reorientation of accounts of the social from elicited attitudes and views to transactions and practices; and, the inspection of individuals arrayed in relation to other individuals within whole (sub) populations. It is also a politics that mobilizes new informational gatekeepers and organizers in the making and analysis of transactional data and challenges dominant or expert forms of analysis and representation.

[About the book]: This book considers the state of the city and contemporary urbanisation from a range of intellectual and international perspectives. - The most interdisciplinary collection of its kind - Provides a contemporary update on urban thinking that builds on well established debates in the field - Uses the city to explore economic, social, cultural, environmental and political issues more broadly - Includes contributions from non Western perspectives and cities

While the census is sometimes understood to be an objectifying practice that constructs and makes up a population, in this paper I am concerned with how it is necessary to produce census subjects in order to construct population. By drawing on formulations by Latour, Deleuze and Law, I conceive of census taking as a practice performed by heterogeneous socio-technical arrangements of actors—humans, paper forms, categories, concepts, definitions, topography, geography—whose mediations, interactions and encounters produce census subjects. It is through the relays and interactions between varying and never fixed technological, natural and cultural actors that census taking is performed. I analyse these arrangements as constituting agencements, which focuses our attention on how agency and action are configured by and contingent upon the socio-technical arrangements that make them up. Agencements assume different socio-technical configurations and thus construct different social realities and populations that cannot be captured in a single account. \ud The argument is advanced through an account of the taking of what was declared the first ‘scientific’ enumeration of ‘Indians’ and ‘Eskimos,’ the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Canadian Far North in 1911. I argue that the agencements were not able to bring forth the subjectivities necessary to construct population in the Far North. Not able to find subjects then, census taking could not produce nor construct a population in the Far North and the practice of census taking ended up creating a record of a census ‘other’ —an indeterminate multitude that could not identify and could not be identified as part of the population.

I examine practices of modern census making with a specific focus on Canadian censuses of population from 1911-1951. My analysis builds on the work of two recent and related streams of research in the social sciences. One draws from Foucault's writings on biopower and post-Foucauldian governmentality studies. It examines the census as a political technology that produces a specific knowledge or political arithmetic (statistics) of the population, so that its forces and strengths can be acted upon by various state authorities. The census is thus understood as a field for the administration of the state. The other focuses on how censuses are socially constructed, on the ‘making’ of censuses as opposed to the ‘taking’ of censuses and the use of census data as ‘evidence’. These studies document how the interests and political influence of various actors shape census making. The census is thus understood as a particular way of defining, collecting and organising social observations about individuals and not a simple reflection of an empirically existing reality. While the two streams of research have usefully challenged the facticity of census data, they have tended to reinforce a division between the real and the constructed. For if census data is not ‘real’ but a particular construction then what exactly does it represent? I contend that censuses are part of myriad identification practices that have come to produce subjects who are able to recognise and identify themselves in relation to the categories constructed and circulated by the census. It is through processes of double identification (state-citizen) that census categories come into existence, become facts and can then in turn not only be measured, analysed and assembled (objectification) but also be identified with (subjectification). The presence of such double identification makes an ostensible division between facticity and representation artificial.

Data is the new raw material of the 21st century; it allows citizens to hold governments to account, drives improvements in public services by informing choice, and provides a feedstock for innovation and growth. Google Data Analytics Social Science Research (2012) Introduction In 2010 the Cabinet Office of the UK government introduced its Transparency Agenda (TA) as a key part of its efficiency and reform programme and as a means of taking power away from Whitehall and putting it in the hands of the public. Through the oversight of the Public Sector Transparency Board, all Whitehall departments must publish key public data-sets, from expenses to business plans, on their websites in specified open data standards as a means of advancing a public right to data. A number of platforms then consolidate all of the data via online and interactive access points. In addition to spurring service delivery improvements and stimulating the digital economy, the TA is said to be liberating and making government data more accessible, interesting and dynamic via websites, mobile device apps and other platforms. Along with powerful visualization devices, quantitative data about the performance of the state is being rendered accessible and legible in innovative ways. Through the TA government data is on the move and travelling to myriad sites and even sceptics see the possibilities that are opened up by this ‘big data’. As the title of this chapter suggests, open government data constitute indicators of the state's performance just as indicators in general make phenomena visible so that they can be assessed, compared and ranked. The TA ostensibly renders the state visible to scrutiny such that the gaze is turned from the governed back onto the governors where subjects of ‘dataveillance’ now engage in ‘sousveillance’ – a ‘watchful vigilance from underneath’ (Dennis 2008). In a time of Wikileaks, MPs' expenses and open government data, it is tempting to conclude that ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1998) is being transformed into ‘seeing a state’. However, rather than considering the TA as a practice of disclosure and oversight, I argue that the transparent state is being done by a changing configuration of mediators that is generative of data publics and multiple versions of the state and the very condition that it seeks to eradicate: distrust in the workings of the state.

I consider some arguments of social science and humanities researchers about the challenge that big data presents for social science methods. What they suggest is that social scientists need to engage with big data rather than retreat into internal debates about its meaning and implications. Instead, understanding big data requires and provides an opportunity for the interdisciplinary development of methods that innovatively, critically and reflexively engage with new forms of data. Unlike data and methods that social scientists have typically worked with in the past, big data calls for skills and approaches that cut across disciplines. Drawing on work in science and technology studies and understandings of the ‘the social life of methods’, I argue that this is in part due to the fragmentation and redistribution of expertise, knowledge and methods that new data sources engender, including their incipient relations to government and industry and entanglements with social worlds.

Social and cultural research has changed dramatically in the last few years in response to changing conceptions of the empirical, an intensification of interest in interdisciplinary work, and the growing need to communicate with diverse users and audiences. Methods texts, however, have not kept pace with these changes. This volume provides a set of new approaches for the investigation of the contemporary world. Building on the increasing importance of methodologies that cut across disciplines, more than twenty expert authors explain the utility of 'devices' for social and cultural research – their essays cover such diverse devices as the list, the pattern, the event, the photograph, the tape recorder and the anecdote. This fascinating collection stresses the open-endedness of the social world, and explores the ways in which each device requires the user to reflect critically on the value and status of contemporary ways of making knowledge. With a range of genres and styles of writing, each chapter presents the device as a hinge between theory and practice, ontology and epistemology, and explores whether and how methods can be inventive. The book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of sociology and cultural studies.

I define how public space is constituted not by real property but by a regime made up of regulatory practices. What is at issue in assertions about the decline of public space is that this regulatory regime is reconfiguring liberty, that is, rights to public space, through a change in the conception of the public, of who and what belong as part of the public. By way of a case study, the redevelopment of the corner of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Toronto, I argue that liberty is defined by a multiplicity of practices (such as laws, regulations, urban design, surveillance and policing) that are oriented to a particular conception of the public, and which seek to guide the conduct of agents. This suggests that if our concern is to expand the political and social uses of public space then we need to turn our attention away from resources, spaces and goods and towards how the regulatory regime configures liberty and in turn the possibilities that public space can be taken and made.

What makes a good city? This question has long preoccupied groups interested and involved in the making and remaking of city spaces. In The Moral Economy of Cities, Evelyn S. Ruppert contends that the vision of the ‘good city’ embraced by professionals in the business of city making recognizes the interests of a dominant public, namely middle class consumers, office workers, tourists, and families. This vision stigmatizes certain members of the public like street youth, panhandlers, discount- and low-income shoppers, and the language used to extol the virtues of the good city inherently\ud moralizes social conduct in the city.\ud \ud Using the redevelopment of the Yonge-Dundas intersection in downtown Toronto in the mid-1990s as a case study, Ruppert examines the language of planners, urban designers, architects, and marketing analysts to reveal the extent to which moralization legitimizes these professions in the public eye and buttresses the very projects they produce. Ruppert’s conclusion that economic practices are not free from moral\ud investment encourages the considerable task of re-examining the implications of city planning and development worldwide.

What kind of citizenship has Snowden performed? Apparently it is not American citizenship because American authorities attempted to try him for treason and he became a stateless fugitive. After requesting political asylum in 21 countries he was eventually granted temporary asylum in Russia. Neither states nor international organizations recognized his act as an act of citizenship. Did Snowden perform a citizenship that is yet to come? Did he perform an international citizenship? The issue of rights usually recognized in the literature on the debate about Snowden’s act concerns its content such as the practices of states spying on their citizens. This article focuses on the act itself as making digital rights claims that don’t yet exist in law. We argue that just as Snowden’s act disrupted surveillance practices that evermore traverse national borders it also called for digital rights and responsibilities that traverse national legal orders.

Since Edward Snowden disclosures on NSA’s practices, many articles have been written about the relationship between digital data and Intelligence Services (IS), although few of them have investigated the use of these data by IS’ in their everyday practices. Presenting the first results of a three years research including interviews with practitioners and adopting a Bourdieusian perspective, this chapter proposes first to reflect on data ownership and the way IS intercept data and construct them for their own purposes, second with whom and how do they exchange data (trans)nationally. To this effect, we draw a transnational space of the objective positions of the different forms of capital mobilized by the various types of IS. As a result, three distinct groups emerge depending on the structural proximity of the type of institutional objectives they defend and by the way they use digital technology in order share data. Cooperation appears to be stronger at the transnational level than at the national one. In that respect, the linkage between positions, professional habitus and practices constitutes a challenging counterpoint both to the methodological nationalism, that presupposes the existence of a national intelligence community, and to a fairly common perspective in international relations and security studies that provides a disembodied analysis of intelligence practices and an history without actors.

Data has become a social and political issue not only because it concerns anyone who is connected to the Internet but also because it reconfigures relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. Just about every device is now connected to the Internet and generating vast quantities of digital traces about interactions, transactions and movements whether users are aware or not. What started as an ostensibly liberated space rapidly became the space over and through which governments and corporations began collecting, storing, retrieving, analysing, and producing data that analyses what people do and say on the Internet. This ranges from who communicates with whom, who goes where, and who says what – and much more besides. This is now being augmented with data that people produce about themselves, especially their relations, body movements and measurements; the amount and range of data that has become available is, as everyone now knows, staggering. This chapter introduces the main themes of the book to position these developments within a broad historical-sociological perspective and to articulate an international political sociology of data politics.

International audience; ‘Fake news’ is a key subject of data politics, but also a tricky a one. As this chapter aims to show, various phenomena signified by this misleading label have little in common, except being opposite to the kind of algorithmic intelligence that most other chapters present as the main concern of data politics. This does not mean that ‘fake news’ is not related to computational analytics or political intentions, but it does mean that this relation is not straightforward.To discuss this relation, I will go through a three-stage argument. First, I will criticise the notion of ‘fake news’, dismissing the idea that this type of misinformation can be defined by its relationship to truth. Second, I will propose a different definition of this phenomenon based on its circulation rather than of its contents. Third, I will reintroduce the connection to data politics, by describing the economic, communicational, technological, cultural and political dimensions of junk news.