Publish and Flourish is an annual event that recognizes the accomplishments of our faculty and staff who have published a book within the past year. In connection with the Office of Research, the UW Tacoma Library celebrates the achievements of our campus community. The UW Tacoma Library purchases all faculty and staff publications to make them available to the UW community. This week we are highlighting:
Data Power: Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance
Author: Jim E. Thatcher with Craig M. Dalton
Department: School of Urban Studies
“In recent years, popular media have inundated audiences with sensationalised headlines recounting data breaches, new forms of surveillance and other dangers of our digital age. Despite their regularity, such accounts treat each case as unprecedented and unique. This book proposes a radical rethinking of the history, present and future of our relations with the digital, spatial technologies that increasingly mediate our everyday lives.
From smartphones to surveillance cameras, to navigational satellites, these new technologies offer visions of integrated, smooth and efficient societies, even as they directly conflict with the ways users experience them. Recognising the potential for both control and liberation, the authors argue against both acquiescence to and rejection of these technologies.
Through intentional use of the very systems that monitor them, activists from Charlottesville to Hong Kong are subverting, resisting and repurposing geographic technologies. Using examples as varied as writings on the first telephones to the experiences of a feminist collective for migrant women in Spain, the authors present a revolution of everyday technologies. In the face of the seemingly inevitable dominance of corporate interests, these technologies allow us to create new spaces of affinity, and a new politics of change.” — Pluto Press
Review (from Pluto Books):
“Data Power is an activist handbook wrapped in a theoretical treatise inside a media manifesto. The authors have a lively set of suggestions that provide a welcome antidote to the temptations of resignation and complacency” – Mark Andrejevic, Professor in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University
Find the book in the UW Libraries catalog here (available open-access).
Find out more about the author here.
The UW Tacoma Library is very proud of your accomplishments, Jim. Congratulations!