Algorithmic Life

Louise Amoore is Professor of Political Geography at the University of Durham. She researches and teaches in the areas of global geopolitics and security, and is particularly interested in how contemporary forms of data, analytics and risk management are changing border management and security. Her latest book The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability was published in 2013 by Duke University Press. She is currently ESRC Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellow (2012–2015), and her project Securing against Future Events (SaFE): Pre-emption, Protocols and Publics (ES/K000276/1) examines how inferred futures become the basis for new forms of security risk calculus. Volha Piotukh holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Leeds and is currently Postdoctoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Geography of the University of Durham, where she works with Prof. Louise Amoore on Securing against Future Events (SaFE): Pre-emption, Protocols and Publics research project. Prior to that, she taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Westminster and UCL. She is the author of Biopolitics, Governmentality and Humanitarianism: ‘Caring’ for the Population in Afghanistan and Belarus (Routledge, 2015), which offers an interpretation of the post-Cold War changes in the nature of humanitarian action using Michel Foucault’s theorising on biopolitics and governmentality, placed in a broader context of his thinking on power.

Introduction Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh Part 1. Algorithmic life Chapter 1. ‘The public and its algorithms: Comparing and experimenting with calculated publics’ Andreas Birkbak and Hjalmar Bang Carlsen Chapter 2. ‘The libraryness of calculative devices: Artificially intelligent librarians and their impact on information consumption’ Martijn van Otterlo Part 2. Calculation in the age of big data Chapter 3. ‘Experiencing a personalised augmented reality: Users of Foursquare in urban space’ Sarah Widmer Chapter 4. ‘A politics of redeployment: Malleable technologies and the localisation of anticipatory governance’ Nathaniel O’Grady Chapter 5. ‘Seeing the invisible algorithm: The practical politics of tracking the credit trackers’ Joe Deville and Lonneke van der Velden Part 3. Signal, visualise, calculate Chapter 6. ‘Bodies of information: Data, distance and decision-making at the limits of the war prison’ Richard Nisa Chapter 7. ‘Data anxieties: Objectivity and difference in early Vietnam war computing’ Oliver Belcher Chapter 8. ‘Seeing futures' – Politics of visuality and affect’ Matthias Leese Part 4. Affective devices Chapter 9. ‘Love’s algorithm: ‘The perfect parts for my machine’’ Lee Mackinnon Chapter 10. ‘Calculating obesity, pre-emptive power and the politics of futurity: The case of Change4Life’ Rebecca Coleman