The New Everyday
The New Everyday is a web publication that exists “between a blog and a journal,” also known as “middle state” publishing.
For many of the new forms of academic practice generated in the past twenty-five years, the “everyday” has been a central and motivating topic and theoretical insight, from cultural studies to visual culture and performance studies. However, there must now be questions concerning the everyday in both registers. For example, when Michel de Certeau privileged walking as a means of reappropriating city space, he could not have anticipated the pervasive presence of surveillance cameras in many Western cities. By the same token, the subcultures that were so central for the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, have become commodified and promoted by the likes of MTV.
We might also want to ask where is the everyday in the era of globalization, migration, outsourcing and global media? Which everyday takes priority? While violence and policing were always concerns for the critical use of the everyday, how does the persistence of state terror, permanent civil war or non-state violence transform our sense of the everyday? While this was called the “state of exception” under George W. Bush, a realization has spread that the law continues to be used, albeit in mangled fashion, and that the new practices have come to form a norm, not an exception. Read more...
The Politics of Facial Recognition Systems: Issues and Policy
The Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response is proud to present an important report, Facial Recognition Technology: A Survey of Policy and Implementation Issues. The report is co-authored by Helen Nissenbaum New York University; Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, Computer Science, and the Information Law Institute, and Lucas D. Introna, Lancaster University, UK; Centre for the Study of Technology and Organization. The report highlights the potential and limitations of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT), noting those tasks for which it seems ready for deployment, those areas where performance obstacles may be overcome by future technological developments or sound operating procedures, and still other issues which appear intractable. Its concern with efficacy extends to ethical considerations.
Effects of Racial Appeals
A study by Charlton McIlwain testing the effects of racial appeals on African American Voters. Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) is a National Science Foundation supported project (Managed by Principal Investigators at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan) that provides social scientists with new opportunities for original data collection. It provides investigators an opportunity to run their studies on a random sample of the population that is interviewed via the Internet and WebTV. Results from the study will be included in McIlwain's forthcoming book, tentatively titled, Race Appeal.