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This talk will attend to two democratic technologies in practice, the parliament as a building and the regulation of drug use.
One of the central promises of parliamentary democracy as a model of governance is that it can deal with any problem that concerns a political community. In a way, it is possible to think of parliament buildings as material manifestations of this promise. They can be thought of as complex political technologies that in Europe and North America gained a more-or-less standardised form by the end of the nineteenth century. The Hungarian parliament building is no exception. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research conducted in Budapest between 2008 and 2010, the first part of this presentation will provide a material-semiotic analysis of parliaments as problem-solving machines, the smooth operation of which relies upon predefined and preformatted problems. But where do problems come from? The second part of the presentation aims to address this question by shifting focus from parliaments as problem-solving machines to different modes of problematisation. Using the regulation of drug use in Hungary as a specific example, it will outline how a European statistics office, policy networks and civil activist groups collectively constitute the outsides of parliamentary democracy, engaging in politics on the level of problem-formation.
Dr. Endre Dányi is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Sociology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Influenced by Science and Technology Studies (STS), he wrote his PhD thesis at the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University about the Hungarian Parliament as a complex political technology. In his postdoctoral research he traces the limits of this technology by examining how statistics, policy worlds and civil organisations constitute the outsides of parliamentary politics.
This talk is hosted by the Technologies in Practice Research Group at IT University of Copenhagen.
Location:
3A07, IT University of Copenhagen
Date:
2015-Feb-17
Presenter Alison Powell is Assistant Professor in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Her research examines the ways that value decisions are negotiated within the design of new ICTs. She is writing a book on good governance and the Internet of Things, and working on several projects related to citizenship, cities, data and ethics. She recently published “Big Data From the Bottom Up” in Big Data and Society with Nick Couldry, along with several recent publications discussing information policy, activism, and open source culture. She is regularly invited to deliver lectures on the social and political consequences of IoT and Smart Cities projects.
Presenter Andrew Clement is a Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where he coordinates the Information Policy Research Program and co-founded the Identity Privacy and Security Institute. With a PhD in Computer Science, he has had longstanding research and teaching interests in the social implications of information/communication technologies and participatory design. Among his recent privacy/surveillance research projects, are IXmaps.ca an internet mapping tool that helps make more visible NSA warrantless wiretapping activities; SurveillanceRights.ca, which crowd-sources the documentation of video surveillance installations and their (non)compliance with privacy regulations; and Proportionate ID, which demonstrates through overlays for conventional ID cards and a smartphone app privacy protective alternatives to prevailing full disclosure norms. Clement is a co-investigator in The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting research collaboration - 
Rasmus Pagh (Presenter): Big Data: Fairness and TransparencyAbstract: How can we make sure that decisions made based on big data analysis are fair? For example, that they do not indirectly discriminate based on race or gender? And more generally, how do we ensure the transparency that makes people trust that big data is being used in a fair and ethical way? The talk will discuss these questions and some (very) partial attempts at answers.