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

this paper will explore the practice of appliqué quilting, providing a practice-based example of how gifting
can be incorporated as a strategy for making change as part of a socially-engaged craftivist practice.
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Self-Tracking Technologies and Living Personal Data (Chair, Deborah Lupton)
Sarah Pink
Data Ethnography: An Approach to Personal Data
In certain parts of the world, everyday personal data is becoming part of our digital-material experiential
environments. This raises new questions concerning how it feels to inhabit the everyday where data is in the
lifeworld, and is part of how our environments, embodiment, emotions and imaginations are constituted. In
this paper I approach this question by interrogating what it feels like to live with data. This, I argue should go
beyond examining simply how people experience the presence of data in their lives. Rather I call for deeper
ethnographic knowledge of how people actively go about making the presence of such data feel
comfortable, and/or achieve a sense of wellbeing through it. I do so through the prism of the making, use
and experience of personal data through self-tracking technologies.
Deborah Lupton
Feeling Your Data: Personal Digital Data Physicalisations and Data Sense
People’s encounters and entanglements with the personal digital data that they generate is a new and
compelling area of research interest. People are faced with the conundrum of how to interpret, control and
make sense of their lively data. In this paper, I draw on my concept of “data senses” to explore the topic of
how personal digital data and their circulations can be made more perceptible and therefore interpretable
to people with the use of three-dimensional data physicalisations. These objects invite users to “feel your
data”. As I show, “feeling your data” has two meanings: the literal sensation of touching these objects and
the affective responses that are generated from these encounters. I argue that this has implications for
personal digital data meanings, practices and politics.
Glen Fuller
Fitness Analytics, Self-Tracking Assemblages and the Semiotisation of Embodied Activity
At stake for fitness and/or sport enthusiasts is the quality of a given activity as a performance of the body in
a given localised social environment. The localised environment is defined in this context not only
geographically, such as the actual stretch of road or path cycled or run, but also temporally in terms of the
micro-history of ‘fitness’ as a capacity of the trained body and discursively in terms of the different practices
for measuring performance. Based on nine interviews, this paper explores the development and adoption of
particular sensor-based technologies (speed and cadence sensors, GPS and heart rate monitors) for
measuring activity across the biographies of research participants in terms of how the discourse for making
sense of activity changes. This paper argues that enthusiast discourse treats the sensor-equipped body (and
in extension the bicycle) as a medium for measuring activity.
Vaike Fors
Knowing Through Numbers: How Corporeal Data Become Life-based Learning Resources
This paper discusses how embodied and emplaced learning cultures emerge through the use of self-tracking
technologies. The findings are based in interviews with accustomed self-trackers, investigating how the
produced corporeal data become part of how they experience and perceive their bodies and their
environments. The empirical examples presented in the paper elaborate on the tangibility of these data and
how they in their visual and touchable forms afford people to turn their attention toward previously
unarticulated and visceral dimensions of embodied learning activities that are part of their everyday life. This
includes examples of how people experience both gain and lack of meaning of data in self tracking activities,
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