Morgan Currie

Lecturer in Data and Society, University of Edinburgh

My research engages with the relationship between data and democracy – how data infrastructures condition the possibility for forms of democratic governance, civic behavior, and political struggle. My recent work analyses new forms of datafication in city governments through digital tools that subject administrative records to visualisation, algorithmic processing and other machine-readable functions. I also draw from political theories of democracy, including American pragmatism and post-structuralist critical theory, to understand how civil society can use data as a tool to contest political issues. I use fieldwork, interviews, and case study analysis to ask how these new information cultures take shape, and how they might open – or foreclose – democratic decision-making.