Digital transformations with “Nordic characteristics”? Latest trends in the digitalisation of teaching and learning in Nordic higher education

Enabling a just energy transition through solidarity in research

A just energy transition is as much about acknowledging and acting on the socio-material needs of marginalised classes and groups as about informing inclusive and deliberative policy-making towards more equitable energy futures. In democracies, energy social scientists hold a privileged position and special responsibility to do both, thus offering critical support to decision-makers and practitioners. We articulate the challenges and opportunities for energy social scientists to embody solidarity in their research orientation and practices. First, we articulate the need to repoliticise, redemocratise, and negotiate a multiplicity of energy transitions. This includes recognising and engaging…

Could Cambridge Analytica Have Delivered Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Victory? An Anthropologist’s Look at Big Data and Political Campaigning

Abstract I first provide some context about Cambridge Analytica’s (ca) activities, linking them to ca parent company, scl Group, which specialised in “public relations” campaigns around the world across multiple sectors (from politics to defence and development), with the explicit aim of behavioural change. I then analyse in more detail the claims made by mathematician and machine learning scholar David Sumpter, who dismisses the possibility that ca might have successfully deployed internet psychographics (e.g. online personality profiling) in the winning 2016 Trump presidential campaign in the US. I critique his arguments, pointing at the need to focus on the bigger picture and on the tota…

(Re)creating “society in silico” : surveillance capitalism, simulations and subjectivity in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal

This article provides a different angle to understand the Cambridge Analytica (CA) data scandal. It focuses on the role of models and simulations in the big data campaigning tools CA allegedly used, and their epistemological and ontological potential to produce and reproduce voters' digital doubles that would first colonise and eventually replace the analogue selves they were related to. By integrating and revising Zuboff's surveillance capitalism framework with Debord's classic theory of the Spectacle, the article argues that the dystopian simulations played as real life experiments by surveillance capitalist firms such as CA have the ultimate goal of replacing analogue humanity with digit…

Is there a Scandinavian model for MOOCs?

Human-technology relations in an age of surveillance capitalism. Towards an anthropological theory of the dialectic between analogue and digital humanity

What can anthropology contribute to the current debates about the negative effects of social media on people? Starting from a critique of anthropological work that sees human subjectivity and culture as ontologically unaffected by social media use, I propose that human engagement with these digital technologies produces significant ontological transformations that deserve more attention. I develop my analysis in dialogue with Boellstorff’s ontology of the digital, Nardi’s theorisation of virtuality and affordances, and Zuboff’s formulation of surveillance capitalism, and I use empirical illustrations from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal to highlight key theoretical junctures. My main c…