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January 18, 2025

The birth of sensory power (28 January)

Book cover for 'Data Politics'

The birth of sensory power
Engin Isin
28 January 2025 16:30-18:00
Violet Laidlaw room
Chrystal MacMillan Building, George Square
University of Edinburgh

Is it possible to trace transversal geopolitical shifts in the twenty-first-century to the birth of a new form of power, which governs through human-machine interfaces? This is a question that animates a book I have just drafted, which outlines a history of power that revisits sovereign, disciplinary and regulative forms of power from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and explores how a new form of power – sensory power – has emerged since the mid-twentieth century. I explore how the histories of two fields of knowledge – datasciences involving statistics, analytics, and stochastics, and neurosciences involving computation, modelling, and learning – converged in the mid-twentieth century, creating the conditions for the emergence of sensory power. If sensory power has created ‘polities as learning machines’ in the twenty-first century, international politics is experienced in a radically different way, and this may shed some light on the uncertain and dangerous geopolitics of the present.

Engin Isin is a professor emeritus of international politics at Queen Mary University of London.

https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/staff/profiles/isinengin.html 

https://enginfisin.net

Readings

Isin, Engin, and Evelyn Ruppert. 2020. ‘The Birth of Sensory Power: How a Pandemic Made It Visible?’ Big Data & Society 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720969208.

Isin, Engin, and Evelyn Ruppert. 2019. ‘Data’s Empire: Postcolonial Data Politics’. In Data Politics. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315167305.