Making Sense of Political Calculations

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

As recent electoral events have shown, intensive calculations—from data-driven, “micro-targeted” campaigning strategies to the probabilistic electoral forecast models crafted by FiveThirtyEight and The New York Times—have gained considerable authority over how political actors and the public make sense of political processes. These new forms of political calculation present an opportunity, and challenge, for STS scholarship. The politics of quantification has long been a key problematic for STS scholars, who have focused largely on the use of quantitative practices as technologies for exercising state control and as technologies for generating political trust. Are these prevailing schema of control and trust—or objectification and objectivity—sufficient for explaining the potent (politically, culturally, emotionally) forms of calculative practice and engagement evident in contemporary political life? This panel invites papers that explore new ways of understanding the place and power of calculation in political processes, in any historical or contemporary context. Taking this year’s conference theme, In(Sensibilities), as a cue, it particularly invites contributors to reflect on the use of quantitative tools as instruments of sensing, sense-making, and sensation in politics. Topics might include: the quantification of political sentiment; “statactivism”; quantitative methods in political science/theory; performances of calculation in popular media; feedback, reactivity, and performativity; affective engagements with political numbers.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• William P. Deringer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Individual Presentations

• Seeing Algorithms as Infrastructure: Making Sense of the Reddit Voting System in Narrative and Practice - Katherine Lo, University of California, Irvine; Alex S Taylor, City, University of London

• Accounting for Health: Scale as Techno-Sensibility in São Paulo - Jack Mullee, University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology

• Cultivating Taxpayer Subjects as Experts of Government - Kyle Willmott, Simon Fraser University

• The 'Social Rate of Discount' and the Sensibility of the Future - William P. Deringer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• Pollsters Got It Wrong, Did Data Mining Get It Right? On Devices of Public Opinion - Laurie Waller; David Moats, Linköping University, Tema-T (Tema Technology and Social Change)