How to Tame

As our social worlds increasingly shift online, many of the technologies people encounter are mediated by algorithms. Algorithms have become deeply embedded into people's online lives, often working to tailor and personalize their routine encounters with the world. How does one domesticate, or make one's own, an algorithmic system? One of the goals as people adopt new technologies is to weave them into their everyday routines, establishing a pattern of use in order to make that technology their own. In this paper we focus on people's experiences domesticating the short-form video sharing application, TikTok. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore how people's routine experiences with TikTok's For You Page algorithm influence and inform their domestication process. We first highlight people's motivations for adopting TikTok and the challenges they encounter in this initial acquisition phase of domestication. After adopting the platform, we discuss the challenges people experience across the final three phases of domestication: objectification, incorporation, and conversion. We find that though they enjoy TikTok, our participants feel that they are never fully able to domesticate TikTok. As they are never able to fully control their digital selves, and thus integrate it into their routine lives, TikTok is in constant misalignment with their personal moral economy. We discuss the implications of domesticating algorithmic systems, examining the questions of whose values shape the moral economy created by and through people's uses of algorithmic systems, and the impact of nostalgia on the domestication process.

“Let Them Make It Rain and Bling”: Unveiling Community Expectations towards Returned Migrants in Cameroon

In Africa, international migration to the Global North is often interpreted as a means to achieve upward social mobility. This article highlights the importance of considering the socio-economic and political transformations that form migration aspirations, especially among African youths. Simultaneously, increasing restrictive migration regimes impacts the extent to which migrants can meet the clauses in the moral economy of migration in their origin communities. We focus on (Anglophone) Cameroon, where international migration is referred to as “bushfalling”. A person who migrates to a Western society desires or is expected to return home to share the wealth he/she has accumulated. This interpretation of migration forms different perspectives regarding migrants and guides expectations towards returned migrants. However, little is known on how these expectations are defined and redefined in the society of return. Based on focus group discussions conducted among local community members, we show that the expectations were guided by the visa regimes of destination countries. Moreover, successful returnees were defined by their ability to be visible and create an impact after return. Thus, this article contributes more broadly to an African perspective on the meaning and impact of return migration.

Dealing with sentient surplus: A moral economy of greyhound rehoming

This paper explores greyhound rehoming as a practice through which the sentient surplus of New Zealand's racing industry is dealt with. We bring nature-society geography and moral economy scholarship into productive alignment to ask how and to what effect new forms of value are (re)generated from greyhound bodies and lives that have been cast outside the pale of value as surplus. Accounts offered by both literatures tend not to venture beyond the commodity and are yet to fully engage with the entangled nature of morality and the economy. We seek to address these gaps by mapping the workings of a project that attempts to deal with the moral-economic excess of a capitalist nature(culture). By drawing on interviews with five key rehoming actors and an analysis of industry-affiliated documentary material, we trace the material and discursive practices that are aligned around surplus greyhounds in the interest of making value realisable again. Out of our analysis emerge three configurations through which the bodies and labours of these creatures are brought back into the pale of value: as companions-in-waiting, as undead things, and as transformational figures. While these orientations are contested and the value generated from them unevenly distributed, they see value in this capitalist natureculture be reworked so that accumulation can continue. We argue that sentient surplus is a productive paradox that allows the moral and the political to be brought into a fraught but ultimately productive alignment that obscures the contingencies, asymmetries and grim realities of value creation and distribution in greyhound worlds.

Ageist Policies That Favor Older People: What Do Older People Think?

Policies on supportive services have frequently used chronological age to determine rights and needs of people within the adult population. Such policies have been described as ageist, but could also be regarded as favoring older people in cases where chronological age is used as a proxy for needs. In Sweden, municipalities have recently been allowed to grant people above a certain age some home care services without individual needs testing, and several political parties have suggested that a nursing home guarantee at the age of 85 should be introduced. The aim of the study that this presentation reports on was to investigate views among older people on age as an organizing principle for distributing eldercare services. Data was collected through an online surveys to members of pensioners’ organisations (N=1540). Respondents were asked about their views on a number of age-related policies that are used or proposed as part of the eldercare system in Sweden. The analysis revealed a general support for the use of chronological age as a proxy for needs. This suggest that respondents used an interest groups perspective and supported stereotypical arrangements that favored older people. When free-text answers were included in the analysis, it became evident that the use of chronological age was not related to the problem of ageism. In the presentation we will discuss the potential gap between anti-ageism and views of older people and what a framework on ageism brings into the moral economy of eldercare.