Technology, data and society
Reflecting on UN Sustainable Development Goal 9: Industries, Innovation and Infrastructure, Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities and Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, our list looks at the potential for innovation and creative solutions to global social problems, whilst critically engaging with the risks, such as worsened social inequality and damage to human rights.
Subjects covered include the development of sustainable technology to help combat climate change, the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse data more efficiently, the way social media creates a space for people to organise international social activism and the need to balance our digital lives and retain data sovereignty, especially for the most vulnerable in society.
Bristol University Press and Policy Press are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. In Technology, data and innovation, we aim to address the following goals:
Guerrilla Democracy
Mobile Power and Revolution in the 21st Century
Combining cutting edge theories with empirical research, this timely book offers an in-depth analysis of current platform-based radical movements to show how digital technologies revolutionise political and economic organising. This is an invaluable contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between technology and society.
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The Political Economy of Digital Monopolies
Contradictions and Alternatives to Data Commodification
As outrage over the socially damaging practices of technology companies intensifies, this book asks what it actually means to hold a 'monopoly' in the tech world and offers an in-depth analysis of how these corporate giants are produced, financialized, and regulated.
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The Public and Their Platforms
Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media
Cutting across multiple disciplines, this book maps out a new role for the public sociologist in the post-COVID world. It envisions a new kind of public sociology that brings together “the digital” and "the physical” to create public spaces where critical scholarship and active civic engagement can meet in a mutually reinforcing way.
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Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory
Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past
Social media platforms hold vast amounts of data about our lives. Content from the past is increasingly being presented in the form of ‘memories’. Critically exploring this new form of memory making, this unique book asks how social media are beginning to change the way we remember.
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The Mutant Project
Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
An anthropologist visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask: whose values are guiding gene-editing experiments, and what are the implications for humanity?
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Algorithms and the End of Politics
How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book is a timely analysis of the growing impact of digital technologies on populism in the US and beyond.
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Data Lives
How Data Are Made and Shape Our World
Rob Kitchin explores how data-driven technologies have become essential to society, government and the economy. Blending scholarly analysis, biography and fiction, he demonstrates how data influence our daily lives.
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The Age of Low Tech
Towards a Technologically Sustainable Civilization
A best-seller in France, this English language edition introduces readers to an alternative perspective on our technological future. Bihouix skilfully goes against the grain to argue that ‘high’ technology will not solve global problems and envisages a different approach to manage our resources and build a more resilient and sustainable society.
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Slow Computing
Why We Need Balanced Digital Lives
Is it possible to experience the joy and benefits of computing in a way that asserts individual and collective autonomy?
Drawing on the ideas of the ‘slow movement’, Slow Computing sets out numerous practical and political means to take back control and counter the more pernicious effects of living digital lives.
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Social Media and Social Work
Implications and Opportunities for Practice
Using real-life examples, this book enables practitioners and students to consider the ethics and assess the impact of social media on their professional conduct, and their ability to maintain public confidence.
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Online Child Sexual Victimisation
Focusing on online facilitated online sexual abuse, this book takes a rigorous approach to existing literature to address some of the most pressing public and policy questions on this type of abuse. It examines which children are most vulnerable, how their vulnerability is made, what they are vulnerable to and how we can foster resilience.
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Science, Belief and Society
International Perspectives on Religion, Non-Religion and the Public Understanding of Science
This wide-ranging book critically reviews the ways in which religious and non-religious belief systems interact with scientific methods, traditions and theories. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the United States, the book shows how debates about science and belief are firmly embedded in political conflict, class, community and culture.
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Related journals
Evidence & Policy
eHealth technologies and the know-do gap: exploring the role of knowledge mobilisation
Sharing confidential health data for research purposes in the UK: where are ‘publics’ in the public interest? [Open Access]
International Journal of Care and Caring
Responses to vulnerability: care ethics and the technologisation of eldercare
Critical and Radical Social Work
Technicist education: paving the way for the rise of the social work robots?