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- Convenors:
-
Belinda Wu
(The Open University)
Gareth Bentley (SOAS)
- Stream:
- G: Methods
- Location:
- D5
- Start time:
- 27 June, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Digital and visual enabled technologies translate global inequality realities into everyday intersubjective ideas and pose complex challenges. We invite discussions on research and communication methods engaging this world of diverse data and audiences that will shape the global inequality agenda.
Long Abstract:
Inequality and global injustice are the causes celebres of our times. Do new technologies, especially the internet, help media and social media make global inequality issues as apparent and meaningful as everyday social communication and interaction? Such changes constitute political economic and poststructural complex theoretical challenges to inequality research, providing unprecedented opportunities as well as dilemmas. Indeed can the latest developmental discourses catalyse a bottom-up levelling of communicative power networks or reproduce top-down exploitation and inequality fatigue in the form of consumer capitalist rhetoric?
The interdisciplinary research of global inequality issues has taken developmental studies out of its comfort zone. The ESRC Centre for Research on Sociology-Cultural change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester and the Open University has been geared to orientate intellectual understanding in the face of changing agendas and demands for new interdisciplinary alliances. Yet how far are academic researchers prepared to go to work with non-mainstream methods? For instance, there is an evident move in data methods recently, which have become vociferous around the issue of Big Data, social media and fake news.
More importantly, such phenomena are already here and they challenge the production and communication of development information and knowledge. The way that we engage with this world of unstructured data and diverse transnational audiences will shape the future global inequality agenda. Therefore, we invite researchers to discuss how inequality studies using different methods can complement and strengthen developmental perspectives in the context of the global new trends and challenges in global inequality research.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Big Data for Development (BD4D) technology enabled data-driven innovations can revolutionalise the global inequality reduction research and practice. However, technical and ethical challenges in implementing BD4D can amplify or even cause development discourses. This paper discusses such issues.
Paper long abstract:
The confluence of trends of the increasing migration of socio-economic activities to the Internet and the declining cost of data collection, storage and processing, are leading to the generation and use of huge volumes of data. The "big data" has become an infrastructural resource. Like physical infrastructure can enable beneficial spillovers to facilitate trade and social exchanges, data spillovers can also open up significant growth opportunities, or generate benefits across society in ways that could not be foreseen when the data were created. This includes benefits from research and the development of new products, processes, organisational methods and markets - a phenomenon known as data-driven innovation (DDI).
Big Data for Development (BD4D) technologies have revolutionalised the way we tackle global inequality issues in healthcare, education, and agriculture; facilitated the alleviation of poverty; and helped to tackle humanitarian crises and violent conflicts. However, there are also serious technical and ethnical challenges in implementing the BD4D. Without careful application, such technologies can bring adverse impact in amplifying or even causing discourses in both global inequality research and practice.
This paper reviews the impact of BD4D on the development of international societies, highlights important challenges and pressing issues such as efficient data acquisition and sharing, establishing of context and veracity of a dataset, and ensuring appropriate privacy. This paper argues that interdisciplinary efforts must be encouraged and financially incentivised so that BD4D can be analysed with the right perspectives and ethics that help to shape the future global inequality agenda.
Paper short abstract:
A historical comparative analysis of BBC visual documentation of global inequalities in Ethiopia in 1984 and Yemen in 2016. Thé paper will examine key technological, aesthetic, moral and aesthetic changes by adopting a post-structural theoretical approach
Paper long abstract:
This paper will adopt a comparative approach comparing a celebrated pre-digital BBC news report by Michael Buerk, documenting global inequality in Ethiopia in 1984 with a post-digital 2016 BBC news report from Yemen by Nawal al-Maghafi called 'Yemen on the Brink of Starvation' The paper will take into account qualitative developmental issues of transmission of emotion and fact. It will try to draw out ethical, aesthetic and affective issues of witnessing of global inequality, a kind of complex female gaze. Objectivity is particularly complicated around issues of imagery in terms of encoding news selection and construction, as well as intersubjective audiences' cultural decodings. What made Buerk's report so successful in 1984 and what has changed in form and content in the intervening thirty years? Is Western discourse deconstructing in an age of quantitative big data and biopolitics? My paper will try to answer this question by discussing complex agency and transparency as the new objectivity. The paper will argue that media audiences like news with a personal touch. it will argue that global inequality news reporting has become more interactive, complex, informal, authentic, subjective and emotional. I will also argue that global inequality news reporting today is breaking the spell of objective journalism and crossing the foreign line between subject and object, between structural and post-structural, between colonial and post-colonial, between journalism and humanitarian activism, between professional neutral reporter and empathic individual. And hopefully discussants will have experienced this transformation within the academy itself!