Aristea Fotopoulou

University of Brighton · School of Media

This article starts from the premise that projects informed by data science can address social concerns, beyond prioritizing the design of efficient products or services. How can we bring the stakeholders and their situated realities back into the picture? It is argued that data-based, participatory interventions can improve health equity and digit...

Read the article here: https://thepolyphony.org/2020/06/16/art-in-isolation-artistic-responses-to-covid-19/ Early artistic responses to Covid-19 offer fascinating insights into key issues arising from the crisis, argue ART/DATA/HEALTH researchers Elodie Marandet, Harriet Barratt, and Aristea Fotopoulou.

This article develops a sociotechnical conceptualisation of data literacies in relation to citizens’ data practices: highlighting the agentic, contextual, critical, and social aspects of data skills and competencies, it frames data literacies as both discursive and material. In order for civil society organisations to make sense of big, small, open...

In this chapter we draw on the figurations of three AI assistants to discuss the social roles that humans assign to them; the anxieties that emerge in relation to their predictive capacity; and their embodied and gendered performances. We argue that uncertainty sits at the heart of our cultural engagement with social robots: it guides how we define...

Prepublication copy of the book chapter: Fotopoulou, A. (forthcoming) Understanding citizen data practices from a feminist perspective: embodiment and the ethics of care. In Stephansen, H. and Trere, E. (eds) Citizen Media and Practice. Taylor & Francis/Routledge: Oxford. This chapter traces the relevance of practice theory for understanding da...

What do citizen media look like in relation to gender today? This entry starts by offering an overview of citizen media practices in a historical narrative, starting with how the Women’s Lib challenged dominant media representations of gender, to Spare Rib and women’s press in the 1980s, to zine-­‐making in the Riot Grrl movement, and other alterna...

Gender and self-tracking, Digital Health/Digital capitalism podcast series with Chris Till, Episode 8, This is not a Sociology Blog.

BOOK: A NETWORKED SELF: PLATFORMS STORIES CONNECTIONS Chapter Title: From Networked to Quantified Self: Self-Tracking and the Moral Economy of Data Sharing Abstract: Advancements in wearable sensors and apps have normalized the sharing of personal data in everyday life. But unlike earlier instances of digital culture and mediation, we are witnes...

In this article, we provide an account of Fitbit, a wearable sensor device, using two complementary analytical approaches: auto-ethnography and media analysis. Drawing on the concept of biopedagogy, which describes the processes of learning and training bodies how to live, we focus on how users learn to self-care with wearable technologies through...

In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world's first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution - the promotional pu...

Reproductive rights have been a key issue for feminist politics. From the first publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Health Book Collective in 1970, the feminist health movement has formulated a wider critique of technoscience. Scholars in the field of social studies of science and technology have argued that gender and sexuality rela...

Digital networks are efficient when it comes to sharing information, but this is not their only function; online, actors come together in real time to ‘make things public’ (Latour and Weibel 2005), to frame public concerns in unique ways and to claim voice and recognition (Couldry 2010). Digital networks in the so-called Web 2.0 era are indeed beco...

If the premise of this book is that feminist and queer activist identities are being reconfigured with digital media, how do bodies with sexuality, passion and emotions relate, act and work with digital media technologies? The internet, the mobile devices and apps that are habitually used to connect are neither cold and wired, as was imagined in cy...

This book sheds new light on the way that, in the last decade, digital technologies have become inextricably linked to culture, economy and politics and how they have transformed feminist and queer activism. This exciting text critically analyses the contradictions, tensions and often-paradoxical aspects that characterize such politics, both in rel...

The key claim of this book is that doing feminist and queer politics involves enacting ourselves as activists, embodied and political subjects through media practices, technologies and their imaginaries. In this chapter, I am driven by the need to understand what digital networking technologies mean for queer activists, and how their sense of belon...

In this book, I set off to answer a key question – what do feminism and queer activism mean in the digital era, when digital technologies are so inextricably linked to culture, economy and politics? By asking what feminism and queer activism are in the digital era, I have focused on the contradictions, tensions and often-paradoxical aspects of thes...

Feminist and queer activism are guided by strong visions of social change in which digital and network communications feature prominently. The invisibility, normalisation and ubiquity of media in our everyday lives, and the strong influence of imaginaries, make it important to question their role and impact on contemporary political identities and...

In preparation for chapter drafts in co-authored book: Policy and research programmes articulating the role of eHealth and mHealth in the future of European health care, promise flexible and more personalized care, patient involvement and greater citizen responsibility in managing disease and staying healthy. It is not clear however, how the ICT-ba...

This article explores the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital expertise. Expertise is investigated as it operates in everyday situations - drawing on empirical research undertaken in Brighton, UK, as part of the Communities and Cultures Network+ project. It is also deployed as a heuristic for inquiry into questions o...

This document provides a set of policy recommendations, based on the findings of a three-year long case study on wearable sensors. The key objective was to assess state-of-the-art developments in this domain of innovation, using evaluation and analytic methods that correspond with the expertise and experience available on our study team and among o...

The aim of the Epinet case study was to explore and interact with the epistemic communities / networks that have been developing, implementing, supporting and promoting IVM technologies. The study team consisted of expertise in sociotechnical evaluations, systems and uncertainty analysis, ethics and media studies. The team identified early on a sma...

This article explores tensions between the imaginaries and material hindrances that accompany the development of digital infrastructures for narrative exchange and public engagement. Digital infrastructures allow civil society organizations to become narrators of their community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition. Often full developme...

This article examines the emergence of new, inter-local spaces of news production and consumption, drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with community reporters trained by a community reporter organisation based in the north of England. Practices of news production and content generation are focused on people's own communities and they are...

This article argues against the assumption that agency and reflexivity disappear in an age of ‘algorithmic power’ (Lash 2007). Following the suggestions of Beer (2009), it proposes that, far from disappearing, new forms of agency and reflexivity around the embedding in everyday practice of not only algorithms but also analytics more broadly are eme...

This article examines the emergence of new, inter-local spaces of news production and consumption, drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with community reporters trained by a community reporter organisation based in the north of England. Practices of news production and content generation are focused on people's own communities and they are...

This article analyses the social imaginary of ‘networked feminism’ as an ideological construct of legitimate political engagement, drawing on ethnographic study conducted with London-based women’s organisations. For many women’s groups, the desire to connect echoes libertarian visions of Web 2.0 as an ‘open’ and ‘shared’ space, and it is encouraged...

Available online here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/participation-now/quantified-self-community-lifelogging-and-making-of-smart-pub/

This article explores the possibilities for new forms of ‘digital citizenship’ currently emerging through digitally supported processes of narrative exchange. Using Dahlgren's (Dahlgren, P. 2003. “Reconfiguring Civic Culture in the New Media Milieu.” In Media and the Restyling of Politics, edited by J. Corner, and D. Pels, 151–170. London: Sage; Da...

Building on the principles of the digital storytelling movement, this article asks whether the narrative exchange within the ‘storycircles’ of storymakers created in face-to-face workshops can be further replicated by drawing on digital infrastructure in specific ways. It addresses this question by reporting on the successes and limitations of a fi...

This article suggests that, in a world emerging in and through mediation, branded sex bloggers and portals become (re)mediators of queer and feminist politics. It examines the websites of two porn production companies, Nofauxxx and Furry Girl, and analyses how they respond to older media forms, re-articulate long-standing debates about pornography...

This article seeks to draw links between intersectionality and queer studies as epistemological strands by examining their common methodological tasks and by tracing some similar difficulties of translating theory into research methods. Intersectionality is the systematic study of the ways in which differences such as race, gender, sexuality, class...