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

Western civilisation – permeates the space and everyday life practices of people in Turkey with all its
political connotations. Drawing on this context, my paper focuses on spatial practices in Istanbul that are
shaped in a dialectical manner between Islam and secularism. Taking the secular and religious as analytical
keys, I examine discursive and performative practices of the secular and religious through annual
celebrations and commemorations organised in the districts of Istanbul. I discuss the relationship between
civic engagement and the secularity/religiosity of events with particular attention to women’s participation
in urban life.
2H Data Cultures: Beyond the Given (Chair, Sal Humphreys)
Following its etymological roots, data means “the given.” Arguing that data is however not simply “given” but
constructed and utilized in particular ways, this panel probes a contextualized approach to data cultures and the
politics of data. It addresses the translation between data and knowledge as well as articulations between
micropolitics and macropolitics. The aim is to think across scales-from the local to the global and the body to the
city-and understand the various implications of data-based modalities of management and organization. Hence the
panel inquires into the parallels and differences between proprietary social media platforms, smart-city applications
and collaborative, open-source initiatives.
Grant Bollmer Scalable Intimacy/Captured Emotions
“Intimacy builds worlds,” claims Lauren Berlant, “it creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds
of relation.” Today, the political battles that define and mobilise intimacy involve conflicts that negotiate
banal local attachments with a technological network that promises global connectivity. This talk places into
dialogue questions of intimacy – seemingly minor interactions that reveal the quotidian bonds that make our
lives and worlds – with questions of scale provoked by the “global intimacy” of social media. Drawing on the
arguments of Zizi Pappacharissi’s Affective Publics, as well my own Inhuman Networks, I examine attempts
by Facebook and other social media platforms to capture and analyse emotions as data that are then used to
build a “world” that seems to exclude conscious human interaction. Thus, I chart how “intimacy” can be
used to functionally reimagine “the human,” excluding the local attachments implied by the term “intimacy”
for an imaginary global “connectivity.”
Rolien Hoyng
The Politics of Free Flow: Data Mobilities and Territoriality in Hong Kong
Focused on Hong Kong, this paper explores how data routing informs management techniques and
rationalities in techno-centric urban governance apparatuses that are articulated to norms such as
“transparency,” “open data,” “connectivity,” and “free flow.” Drawing from mobility studies, data flows –
including their direction, pace and pattern – are managed and channelled in particular ways, and, we can
add, transition into knowledge at particular points. It is this mobility that produces the order of urban life
and space, tying micropolitical routines to macropolitical agendas. However, given Hong Kong’s political
conjuncture, data logics are concomitant with diverse and contested imaginaries of freedom, which are
centered alternatively on mobility, such as unchecked free flow, and territoriality, such as sovereign
entitlements and liberal rights including free speech. Accordingly, this paper explores a series of paradoxes
of mobility and territoriality by comparing techno-centric apparatuses of governance to alternative practices
by activists. Rather than free speech as an abstract right, I highlight emerging imaginaries of informational
freedoms in practices by Hong Kong’s civic hackers and digital activists.
66