Data has emerged as a key component that determines how interactions across the world are structured, mediated and represented. This book examines these new data publics and the areas in which they become operative, via analysis of politics, geographies, environments and social media platforms. By claiming to offer a mechanism to translate every conceivable occurrence into an abstract code that can be endlessly manipulated, digitally processed data has caused conventional reference systems which hinge on our ability to mark points of origin, to rapidly implode. Authors from a range of disciplines provide insights into such a political economy of data capitalism; the political possibilities of techno-logics beyond data appropriation and data refusal; questions of visual, spatial and geographical organization; emergent ways of life and the environments that sustain them; and the current challenges of data publics, which is explored via case studies of three of the most influential platforms in the social media economy today: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. Data Publics will be of great interest to academics and students in the fields of computer science, philosophy, sociology, media and communication studies, architecture, visual culture, art and design, and urban and cultural studies.

Data has emerged as a key component that determines how interactions across the world are structured, mediated and represented. This book examines these new data publics and the areas in which they become operative, via analysis of politics, geographies, environments and social media platforms. By claiming to offer a mechanism to translate every conceivable occurrence into an abstract code that can be endlessly manipulated, digitally processed data has caused conventional reference systems which hinge on our ability to mark points of origin, to rapidly implode. Authors from a range of disciplines provide insights into such a political economy of data capitalism; the political possibilities of techno-logics beyond data appropriation and data refusal; questions of visual, spatial and geographical organization; emergent ways of life and the environments that sustain them; and the current challenges of data publics, which is explored via case studies of three of the most influential platforms in the social media economy today: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. Data Publics will be of great interest to academics and students in the fields of computer science, philosophy, sociology, media and communication studies, architecture, visual culture, art and design, and urban and cultural studies.

The Popular Economy in Urban Latin America: Informality, Materiality and Gender in Commerce advances comparative knowledge and theoretical reflections on urban popular economies in Latin America by going beyond the lenses of so-called informal and street economies. It develops a cultural-economic perspective on the popular urban economy and provides new insights in key concepts such as informality, materiality, and gender. Based on ethnographic work and archival research, the authors of this volume address cases in Brazil, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru. The guiding questions of these case studies are: which actors, and with what agencies, are forming and transforming street markets and other place-based economies, and with what effects? What are the emerging lines of tension in these particular economies? Urban economies in Latin America are becoming increasingly diverse and internally stratified. Itinerant traders work side-by-side with permanent street and market vendors, shopkeepers, and wholesalers who conduct business trips to neighboring countries and China several times a year. International trade and investment as well as technological change foster new forms of interaction between traders, companies and customers, but also create new imbalances in economic communities. Remaining sensitive to history, gender, and urban politics, this volume offers an ethnographically informed cultural and socio-material perspective on how popular economies and commerce thrive, transform, and persist in Latin American cities today.

The rapid changes currently taking place in our urban, political and institutional environments have shifted spatial practice to centre stage both in civic life and academic research. Social networking, political projects, cross-border movements, artistic interventions, urban and environmental initiatives, self-organized educational practices - all articulate the challenges involved in organizing the spaces we share. In this volume, visual culture scholars from around the world discuss the "practical turn" in different fields of critical engagement, proposing fresh ways to assert an interpenetrated space of research and intervention.