Final Report Summary - ARITHMUS (Peopling Europe: How data make a people)
ARITHMUS studied the practices of national and international statisticians as they juggle scientific independence, national autonomy and European comparability to innovate census methods and the making of official statistics of population. It followed how statisticians are rethinking methods in the face of immense changes in digital technologies (smartphones, internet platforms) and new forms of data (government registers, mobile phone data) and connecting this practical work to political questions of the making and governing of Europe. The project did this by analysing how methods do not just describe, measure or count a population that already exists out there. Rather, methods help to enact – that is, bring into being and perform – a European population as an intelligible, knowable entity and object of government. It thus focused on methods as not simply technical but as involving normative and political judgments and choices about what is a population and in turn who are the people of Europe. From defining, standardising, categorising, cleaning and editing to extrapolating, estimating and harmonising data, the project examined numerous data practices that make up methods and in turn the very populations and people that they ostensibly simply reflect. In this way, the project examined how politics happen in and through methods.
The project studied these issues by ethnographically tracing and analysing the day-to-day practical and situated work of statisticians at five national statistical institutes—United Kingdom Office for National Statistics, Statistics Estonia, Statistics Netherlands, Turkish Statistical Institute, and Statistics Finland—and two international statistical organisations—Eurostat and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. It is through close attention to the work of statisticians that the project identified and analysed key assumptions, biases, and political foundations of the making of a European population.
The research resulted to two sets of findings. One concerns how defining and measuring categories through different methods come to matter in making up the population and who are the people of Europe. For example, the project found that a sedentary bias and methodological nationalism underpin population categories and in turn constitute various mobile peoples in Europe as hard-to-count and problematic subjects; and, that how categories are defined and measured enact who are the dominant people of Europe and in turn its dominated ‘others’ such as refugees and asylum seekers, foreigners, homeless people, migrants, and ethnic minorities. The project highlighted how such categories, once authoritative, can have governing effects as they come to shape social polices, support particular political projects, impact upon the distribution of resources and shape collective identities.
A second set concerns how statisticians’ experiments with methods that use new digital technologies and big data could potentially undermine citizen trust in, and the legitimacy of, popualtion statistics. Drawing on a conception developed in a book co-authored by the PI on Being Digital Citizens, the project analysed how these experiments treat digital technologies as one-way tools to extract data about people and do not employ the interactive possibilities of digital technologies through which people could be engaged as active participants and citizens in the making of population data. Through a collaborative design workshop with statisticians, the project developed design principles and road maps for four possible ‘citizen data apps’ that imagine people not as data sources but as citizen co-producers of statistics.
The project connected both sets of concerns to policy and governing interventions. For one, it highlighted that if the European project is not only concerned about knowing ‘How many are we?’ but also ‘Who are we?’ then understanding the performative effects of practices through which Europeans are known should be a matter of political debate and contestation.
The project studied these issues by ethnographically tracing and analysing the day-to-day practical and situated work of statisticians at five national statistical institutes—United Kingdom Office for National Statistics, Statistics Estonia, Statistics Netherlands, Turkish Statistical Institute, and Statistics Finland—and two international statistical organisations—Eurostat and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. It is through close attention to the work of statisticians that the project identified and analysed key assumptions, biases, and political foundations of the making of a European population.
The research resulted to two sets of findings. One concerns how defining and measuring categories through different methods come to matter in making up the population and who are the people of Europe. For example, the project found that a sedentary bias and methodological nationalism underpin population categories and in turn constitute various mobile peoples in Europe as hard-to-count and problematic subjects; and, that how categories are defined and measured enact who are the dominant people of Europe and in turn its dominated ‘others’ such as refugees and asylum seekers, foreigners, homeless people, migrants, and ethnic minorities. The project highlighted how such categories, once authoritative, can have governing effects as they come to shape social polices, support particular political projects, impact upon the distribution of resources and shape collective identities.
A second set concerns how statisticians’ experiments with methods that use new digital technologies and big data could potentially undermine citizen trust in, and the legitimacy of, popualtion statistics. Drawing on a conception developed in a book co-authored by the PI on Being Digital Citizens, the project analysed how these experiments treat digital technologies as one-way tools to extract data about people and do not employ the interactive possibilities of digital technologies through which people could be engaged as active participants and citizens in the making of population data. Through a collaborative design workshop with statisticians, the project developed design principles and road maps for four possible ‘citizen data apps’ that imagine people not as data sources but as citizen co-producers of statistics.
The project connected both sets of concerns to policy and governing interventions. For one, it highlighted that if the European project is not only concerned about knowing ‘How many are we?’ but also ‘Who are we?’ then understanding the performative effects of practices through which Europeans are known should be a matter of political debate and contestation.