‘Nothing Is Less Universal than the Idea of Race’

In 1950, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Métraux, a student of Marcel Mauss, was appointed to head a new Race Bureau at UNESCO in Paris whose mission was to combat racism with the tools of social science. Métraux had worked in the Americas since the 1930s, and his appointment allowed French social scientists to join the global struggle to remove prejudice ‘from the minds of men’. To what extent did French scholars help shape Métraux’s efforts, given that at the time American sociologists and social psychologists dominated the study of race relations? Booklets commissioned by UNESCO and authored by French and American scientists in the early 1950s suggest that linguistic and conceptual barriers made cross-national discussions of race difficult, but not impossible. Thanks in part to Métraux’s campaign, the social scientific study of race relations in post-war France began earlier than is typically remembered.

International organizations and climate change adaptation: A new dataset for the social scientific study of adaptation, 1990–2017

This article introduces a new dataset on the climate change adaptation activities of international organizations (IOs). While climate change adaptation has been studied at the local level and in the context of major climate organizations, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, we provide a first quantitative dataset on non-environmental IOs that can be linked to different social scientific datasets relevant for adaptation. Our new dataset contains information on the governance activities of 30 IOs from 1990 to 2017. Based on this dataset, we introduce different types of adaptation-related activities and develop a quantitative measure of IOs’ climate adaptation engagement. We map the adaptation engagement of the 30 IOs across organizations, across issue areas, and over time. This dataset can be used to compare adaptation activities across and within IOs, but also as an empirical foundation for the emerging research field of global adaptation governance, for which IO climate change adaptation activities are relevant.

Legitimizing Claims of Special Knowledge

A significant function of the category “religion” is demarcating and insulating particular claims of special knowledge — but too often, Religious Studies serves to mystify and defend this function, rather than critically analysing it. Drawing on categories in which claims of special knowledge are central, including Gnosticism, conspiracy theories and esotericism, this paper will look at the history of Religious Studies scholars operating within epistemes which it should be critiquing. Yet a focus on multiple and overlapping knowledges, and competition over epistemic capital, suggests a possible future for the social-scientific study of religion.

Bioinformational diplomacy: Global health emergencies, data sharing and sequential life

Global health emergencies – like COVID-19 – pose major and recurring threats in the 21st century. Now societies can be better protected against such harrowing outbreaks by analysing the detailed genetic sequence data of new pathogens. Why, then, is this valuable epistemic resource frequently withheld by stakeholders – hamstringing the international response and potentially putting lives at risk? This article initiates the social scientific study of bioinformational diplomacy, that is, the emerging field of tensions, sensitivities, practices and enabling instruments surrounding the timely international exchange of bioinformation about global health emergencies. The article genealogically locates this nascent field at the intersection of molecularised life, informationalised biology and securitised health. It investigates the deeper political, economic and scientific problematisations that are engendering this burgeoning field. It finally analyses the emergent international instruments developed by governments, scientists and industry to facilitate more rapid global sharing of bioinformation through novel practices of data passporting. Overall, the in-depth study of bioinformational diplomacy reveals just how deeply, and even constitutively, international relations are entangled with the life sciences – by carefully tracing how laboratory practices of sequencing life at molecular scale also end up recontouring the play of sovereignty, power and security in international relations.

Survey Experiments in the Study of Religions

Survey experiments are burgeoning in the study of religion/s. A survey experiment is simply an experiment conducted on a survey. Survey experiments address key limitations of non-experimental surveys and experiments on convenience samples. Surveys are great for speaking to patterns in a broader population, but are limited in their ability to examine causal mechanisms (i.e., what exactly causes what). Lab experiments speak to causality, but using convenience samples limits generalizability (i.e., the extent to which the patterns can be expected to apply to a wider population). Survey experiments combine strengths from survey methods and experimental methods, providing leverage on both generalizability and causality. By using population-based sampling frames from survey research, survey experiments can generalize to a broader population. And by using experimental methods, specifically randomly assigning people to experimental conditions, survey experiments can establish whether one thing causes another. Although survey experiments are becoming more common in the social scientific study of religion, we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the range of questions and contexts that could be explored with survey experiments.

Programming the platform university: Learning analytics and predictive infrastructures in higher education

This article offers a case study of how platforms and predictive infrastructures are emerging in higher education. It examines a Learning Analytics Application Programming Interface (API) from a popular Learning Management System. The API is treated firstly as an artefact based on the computational abstraction of educational principles, and secondly as an empirical entry point to investigate the emergence of a Learning Analytics infrastructure in a large Australian university. Through in-depth ethnographic interviews and the interpretative analysis of software development workflows, the paper describes an API-mediated platformisation process involving a range of actors and systems: computational experts, algorithms, data-savvy administrative staff and large corporate actors inserting themselves through back-ends and various other dependencies. In the conclusion, the article argues that the platformisation of higher education is part of a broader project that mobilises programmability and computation to re-engineer educational institutions in the interest of efficiency and prediction. However, the social-scientific study of this project cannot ignore the practical and compromised dimension where human actors and technical systems interact and, in the process, generate meaning.