Explore the vast range of titles available.

While Foucault described population as the object of biopower he did not investigate the practices that make it possible to know population. Rather, he tended to overemphasize it as an object on which power can act. However, population is not an object awaiting discovery, but is represented and enacted by specific devices such as censuses and what I call population metrics. The latter enact populations by assembling different categories and measurements of subjects (biographical, biometrie and transactional) in myriad ways to identify and measure the performance of populations. I account for both the object and subject by thinking about how devices consist of agencements; that is, specific arrangements of humans and technologies whose mediations and interactions not only enact populations but also produce subjects. I suggest that population metrics render subjects interpassive whereby other beings or objects take up the role and act in place of the subject.

Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘gig economy’, ‘quantified self’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘data colonialism’, ‘data subjects’ and ‘digital citizens’. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins of modern power in its three major forms: sovereign, disciplinary and regulatory. This article argues that the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 brought these three forms of power into sharp relief but made particularly visible a fourth form of power that we name ‘sensory power’, which has been emerging since the 1980s. The article draws on early studies of power by Michel Foucault, subsequent studies on biopower and biopolitics that expanded on them, and studies in the past decade that focused on data produced from apps, devices and platforms. Yet, despite its ambition, the article is inevitably an outline of a much larger project.

We develop the concept of ‘aesthetic practices’ to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education’s Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required so that data produced at dispersed sites can be brought into relation and projected as populations in forms such as bar charts, heat maps and tables. Two examples of aesthetic practices are analysed based on ethnographic studies we have conducted on the production of data for the Hub and Warehouse: metadata and data cleaning. Metadata enables data to come into relation by containing and accounting for (some of) the differences between data. Data cleaning deals with the indeterminacies and absences of data and involves algorithms to determine what values data can obtain so they can be brought into relation. We attend to how both aesthetic practices involve normative decisions that make absent what exceeds them: embodied knowledge that cannot or has not been documented as well as data that cannot meet the forms required of data portals. While these aesthetic practices are necessary to sustain data portals as ‘sites of projection,’ we also bring critical attention to their performative effects for knowing, enacting and governing populations.

Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and the emergence of new actors promising to produce more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as “big data.” This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods become legitimate and official? We approach this question by conceiving of official statistics as part of a transnational field in which different factions of actors compete and struggle over the authority to innovate the data and methods that are legitimated to produce official statistics. We consider these struggles as a politics of method that is not reducible to a competition between ideas and words. They are also material insofar as they feature competing digital devices mobilized to demonstrate the validity of new data and methods. Through two empirical examples, we identify the strategy of reassembling methods to capture how statisticians tame and contain innovations based on big data, especially those introduced by data scientists, by integrating and simultaneously subordinating them to existing methods. By doing so, we suggest that reassembling is an innovation strategy that secures the relative position of national and international statisticians within the transnational field of statistics.

Using the redevelopment of the Yonge-Dundas intersection in downtown Toronto in the mid-1990s as a case study, Ruppert examines the language of planners, urban designers, architects, and marketing analysts to reveal the extent to which moralization legitimizes these professions in the public eye.

The political integration of the European Union (EU) is fragile for many reasons, not least the reassertion of nationalism. That said, if we examine specific practices and infrastructures, a more complicated story emerges. We juxtapose the political fragility of the EU in relation to the ongoing formation of data infrastructures in official statistics that take part in postnational enactments of Europe’s populations and territories. We develop this argument by analyzing transformations in how European populations are enacted through new technological infrastructures that seek to integrate national census data in “cubes” of cross-tabulated social topics and spatial “grids” of maps. In doing so, these infrastructures give meaning to what “is” Europe in ways that are both old and new. Through standardization and harmonization of social and geographical spaces, “old” geometries of organizing and mapping populations are deployed along with “new” topological arrangements that mix and fold categories of population. Furthermore, we consider how grids and cubes are generative of methodological topologies by closing the distances or differences between methods and making their data equivalent. By paying attention to these practices and infrastructures, we examine how they enable reconfiguring what is known and imagined as Europe and how it is governed.

Politically, Europe has been unable to address itself to a constituted polity and people as more than an agglomeration of nation-states. From the resurgence of nationalisms to the crisis of the single currency and the unprecedented decision of a member state to leave the European Union (EU), core questions about the future of Europe have been rearticulated: Who are the people of Europe? Is there a European identity? What does it mean to say, “I am European?” Where does Europe begin and end? and Who can legitimately claim to be a part of a “European” people? The special issue (SI) seeks to contest dominant framings of the question “Who are the people of Europe?” as only a matter of government policies, electoral campaigns, or parliamentary debates. Instead, the contributions start from the assumption that answers to this question exist in data practices where people are addressed, framed, known, and governed as European. The central argument of this SI is that it is through data practices that the EU seeks to simultaneously constitute its population as a knowable, governable entity, and as a distinct form of peoplehood where common personhood is more important than differences.

One of the central goals of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) is to construct a series of contextual databases related to the making and taking of the Canadian decennial censuses during the first half of the twentieth century. These \"data on the data\" will provide researchers with the evidence necessary to undertake informed and critical analysis of the making, taking, and reception of the census within its historical context. The authors focus on the contextual databases that outline conceptual and practical considerations involved in the collection and construction of two contextual data sources: newspapers and political debates. Drawing on two sets of examples related to the political stakes of the 1911 census, they illustrate more concretely how these \"data on the data\" can be used. Whereas the microdata derived from census manuscripts will enable research into the hidden history of the individual lives of Canadians, the contextual data will make possible inquiries about the making and interpreting of that data and the challenges of the great enumerations of contemporary history.

On 1 November 2010, Chinese officials, backed by a team of 6.5 million census takers, began a 10-day enumeration of more than 400 million households and 1.3 billion people in the People's Republic of China. The undertaking is the sixth decennial census of China (founded in 1949), the largest-ever census in history. On 1 April 2010, India began the first stage of its 15th national census, the seventh since partition, of over 1.2 billion people. The process involves census enumerators visiting each household twice: the first time to list all houses and households and the second, immediately after the census reference date of 1 March 2011, to record individual sociodemographic data. Alongside the census, India is also planning to prepare a National Population Register (NPR) which will include photograph and fingerprint biometrics. The NPR might usher in the era of register-based censuses in the country and could provide population counts on a real time basis when combined with the system of birth and death registration. In 2011, Germany was due to undertake a complete register-based census of over 82 million people, which would mark the first census to be conducted since the 1987 enumeration of the former Federal Republic of Germany (FDR) and the 1981 enumeration of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Rather than a door-to-door canvass as in the case of India and China, the census will be based mainly on the administrative data of population registration offices and the Federal Employment Agency. The Nordic countries have adopted population registers as a source of statistics since the 1970s (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway). In 1981, Denmark was the first country in the world to conduct a totally register-based census and Finland followed in 1990. Since 1980, the censuses in Norway and Sweden have been partly register-based and these countries were planning for their first register-based censuses in 2011. In July 2010, a cross-country campaign was mounted against the Canadian government's decision to scale back the 2011 census to a mandatory short eight-question form coupled with a longer voluntary survey of about 4.5 million households. Critics argued that this will possibly lead to a register-based system in Canada. Frances Maude, the Cabinet Minister responsible for the UK census recently affirmed that his government is examining different ways to count the population more regularly such as using existing public and private databases in order to provide better, quicker information, more frequently and cheaply. Previous studies and inquiries in the UK have recommended that the 2011 enumeration be the last census.

The good city is a consumer city. We have seen how the moralization of conduct underpinned the vision of the secure city, mobilized and activated professional practices, and justified the remaking of Yonge-Dundas. In particular, the vision of safety came to mean securing the space for particular consumer groups. In this way security was connected to consumption; although considered separately, they were understood to be interdependent facets of the good city. More generally, consumption has become a key strategy of redevelopment projects and increasingly central to city economies. It has also emerged as one of the key concerns of the