Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

years of research in Australia and Brazil, I argue that young Brazilians’ fascination with the
Australian megachurch is due two overlapping reasons. First, in its slick presentation (pastors’ and
bands’ way of dressing and speaking; services which are like rock concerts; professional production
values of church services) and material culture (flyers and conference booklets created by skilled
graphic designers), Hillsong emphasises fashion, excitement and youth cultures. Australia”s own
status in Brazil as a “First World” country means that it is imagined as a perfect place, by contrast
with Brazil: its streets are clean and safe, its locals are completely honest, its public transport works
well, it lacks class divisions, and it is technologically sophisticated. Hillsong”s endeavour to
accomplish its motto of “excellence” in every aspect of its enterprise just adds to this imaginary of
perfection that fascinates young Brazilians. Overall, this paper shows a multi-polar cartography of
religious globalisation. Rather than a one-way process of “reverse missionisation” (where Global
South Christians travel to convert the now secular Global North), the spread of Christianity in the
era of globalisation is actually rhizomatic, in that peripheries and semi-peripheries can become
centres and vice-versa. As colonial and settler societies, Brazil and Australia received flows of
Pentecostalism from the US and Europe, but in the past decade flows have moved sideways as
Australia has become a centre of new ways of being Pentecostal for young Brazilians.
Evelyn Ruppert (Goldsmiths, University of London), Evelyn Ruppert is Professor in the Department of
Sociology at Goldsmiths College, the University of London, moving there in 2013 from her previous position
as a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC), a collaboration
between the Open University and the University of Manchester. Prior to academic life, she worked for 11
years as a professional planner and government policy advisor and consultant, and in her academic career
has focused significantly on the social role of censuses. Evelyn is currently PI of an ERC funded project,
People Europe: How data make a people (ARITHMUS; 2014-19). She is founding editor of a new Open
Access SAGE journal, Big Data & Society: Critical Interdisciplinary Inquiries, launched in 2014; the author of
The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens (2006) and, with Engin Isin, of Being Digital Citizens
(2015).
Abstract:
“Where are data citizens?”
If we increasingly know, experience and enact worlds through data then we need to understand
who are the subjects of that data and the space of relations they occupy. The development of the
Internet of Things (IoT) means phones, watches, dishwashers, fridges, cars, and many other devices
are always already connected to the Internet and generating enormous volumes of data about
movements, locations, activities, interests, encounters, and private and public relationships. It also
means that conduct is being mediated through myriad arrangements and conventions of the
Internet. What does this mean for how data subjects become data citizens? If through the act of
making claims data subjects become citizens how do we understand the spaces of this becoming?
Challenging a separation between “real” space and “virtual” space, I define cyberspace as a space
of social struggles: a space of transactions and interactions between and among bodies acting
through the Internet. How these struggles are part-and-parcel of the constitution of data is the
critical framing that I address.
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