Georg Schwarzenberger’s oeuvre has remained significantly underexplored in the literature despite his as one of the most important thinkers in international relations and international law of the twentieth century. Ahead of their time, his works reveal a picture of law that transcends academic boundaries, challenging conventional portrayals of both realism and international law. Through a detailed examination of the works of this theorist, this paper offers an analysis of the fundamental aspects of his theory of international relations and international law. It explores the elements at the heart of Schwarzenberger’s theory of international relations, which, though examined infrequently, retain their relevance in today’s international society. Through this exploration of Schwarzenberger’s works, this paper argues that his theory of international relations provides a powerful commentary on the fundamental structure, nature, and problems of international law. It points to and reveals issues that have remained at the heart of international law until today, offering a sophisticated and self-conscious interrogation of the relationship between law, power, and politics.
Starting from the everyday life concept as the context of symbolic and behavioral interaction, people use symbolic resources and also behaviors that have particular meanings elated with the context characteristics. routines are part of the everyday world, and the start question is: How these routines are influenced by data?
We function in certain spaces and use various objects. Many people have everyday access to many technological devices that improve their possibilities to exchange information. In our contemporary world of life, the digital resources are omnipresent. In this sense, a multiplicity of connections are established. Sociability is dependent on “interconnectivity”, which changes the prevailing modes of social production of meaning. It will be a very important to know how the self and identity construction receive the influence of the digital environment.
There is a domestication of technology in the family context. Technology is processed, interpreted and used within the framework of home paradigms. There is a discussion beetween specialists about the age in which could be used the digital technologies. But in general terms, many families many families allow their iittle children the use of mobile devices
One feature of the contemporary postmodern world is the algorithmizing of everyday family in which data are part of the environment. life. The presence in the home of technological resources such as Alexa changes the standards of access to knowledge. Of course, it is worth analyzing the impact of the use of artificial intelligence at an early age, Lately, the impact of the GPT 3 chat has been discussed in specialized circles.
Unpaid household labour is a major social and economic activity that underpins families and households and is essential for social functioning. At the individual level, household labour is critical to health and well-being, but it is also very time consuming and shared unequally within households. The rising demand for robots to assist with domestic work, such as robotic vacuum cleaners, indicates that some people are turning to digital technologies to solve the work-family crunch.
Despite the increasing digitalisation of domestic work, we know little about individual attitudes to domestic smart technologies and how these vary by personal and family characteristics. This issue is important because differential acceptance of domestic technology could potentially deepen existing workload inequalities across genders and classes, could expose some segments of the population to privacy risks, and transform family interactions.
This paper provides the first picture of acceptability of domestic technologies to UK adults. It is based on a vignette survey we are conducting, which was sent to 12,000 UK respondents selected to match a nationally representative sample on several core demographic characteristics. Our vignettes describe a fictitious family situation where respondents have access to smart technologies that can do housework and care work and are asked to decide whether they would like to use the smart technology. We expect a complex picture to emerge where respondents vary in how acceptable they believe domestic automation to be depending on their family situation, the task at hand and their own characteristics. Preliminary results indicate diverse patterns of acceptability. To give one example, partnered respondents are more open to automating housework, compared to care work. Single respondents are equally open to automating housework and care but are keen to do pet care themselves.
Much scholarship has already attended to the ways that social media influencers engage in affective labor to hail audiences and establish familial relationships with their audiences (Garcia-Rapp 2017; Duffy and Hund 2015) We seek to expand on these conversations to address the tensions between influencer culture, fitness culture, and digital culture to explore how fitness influencers on TikTok integrate wearable and health monitoring technology (e.g. Apple watches, fitbits, and health tracking apps) into their content. Building upon Soto-Vásquez’s (2021) notion of “fit subjectivities,” we argue that fitness influencers are engaging in self-disciplinary practices that model working towards achieving the ultimate “fit”/normative body. Further, this labor is highly gendered, aligning with post-feminist ethos of self-discipline and individual choice through consumption (McRobbie 2008). Furthermore, the social components of wearable tech, fitness tracking apps, and affective labor perpetuate the ideal “fit” body through self-discipline, simultaneously encouraging “friendly” competition through gamified fitness challenges (like closing rings on the Apple Watch or the viral “12/3/20” treadmill exercises), body metric tracking, and public leaderboards, further rendering the body subject to public scrutiny on both fitness and social media platforms. These tools are presented as the pathway to achieving a “fit” body, through a community of fitness influencers who use affect to intentionally situate themselves as the leaders of supportive families/communities in which the reward for participating in fitness facilitated by wearable tech is the idealized “fit” body. Through a thematic analysis of fitness influencers who use wearable tech on TikTok, we aim to illuminate how fitness influencers use emotion and familial bonds to maintain followers while also promoting the ideal “fit” body through self-discipline via wearable tech.
In this paper, I draw from two work in progress chapters from my doctoral thesis currently titled ‘making a meal’ and ‘making a routine.’ I demonstrate how food delivery platforms cook for the world by mimicking paid-unpaid, public-private informal food practices and industries. Yet in cooking up the world, platforms have to engage with people and industries’ actually existing use practices of cooking, eating and making a routine. This argument is part of my doctoral work on what digital platforms Swiggy, Zomato, Instagram and Twitter) do to the labours and cultures of food or foodwork. In this project, I examine how food delivery platforms built relationships with their users through a digital ethnography of their push notifications and use of social media platforms (2020- 21). My in-person ethnographic fieldwork (2022-23) investigated how users (individual/household and restaurant/industry) engaged with food delivery apps through immersions in households, a co-working space and with the restaurant industry From this, I investigated actually existing use practices of cooking, eating and making a routine of meals. I asked how do people absorb algorithmic flows from food delivery apps or match work and life routines to ordering in? Especially since habits and use seem to be central to platforms’ success, was there a platform habit? What happened to platforms if people were not habituated to using them? By paying attention to data about flows between the home and market through commercial and private cooking and the making of routines, I widen the question of platformization out from the workplace into the household. I engage with and contribute to platform scholarship on infrastructure and social reproduction by going beyond platform-worker relationship.
From baby monitors to fall sensors, from location trackers to gas detectors, the market is awash with devices connected to the internet that purport to assist relatives and carers in providing safety and care for children and elderly people. These IoT or smart devices allow at-a-distance or even automatic monitoring and even intervention in case of danger, freeing parents (or sons and daughters) for other tasks and commitments. But at the same time, these devices raise issues of privacy and autonomy and even risks of hacking, illegal surveillance or interference.
Conversely, children and the elderly may be not just passive recipients of IoT care, but also active and knowledgeable users of devices (“digital natives” and “silver surfers”), enacting new intergenerational family dynamics and engendering empowerment.
In a southern European country (Portugal), often characterized as an “early adopter” of technology but also with still a very traditional outlook on family roles (where “welfare society” still compensates much of the deficiencies of the welfare state, particularly in the care of the young and the elderly and infirm), what is the place of these IoT devices? Which families adopt them? How do they appropriate and use them?
This presentation aims to explore some of these issues, by drawing on a multi-method research approach, combining document analysis (for instance, of advertisement of IoT products, media articles), expert interviews (with regulators, consumer associations and IoT companies) and interviews with families. It is based on the ongoing research project Engage_IoT Social Engagements with the Internet of Things (funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology).
Digital and networked media are extending parents’ ability to care for their children across distances, creating forms of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) that manifest as spectral presences (Derrida 1994; Peeren 2014). Commercial products help parents to track their child’s locations, to use a phone’s microphone to listen in to conversations around the child in real-time, and to review the child’s online activity. With apps, it is also possible to control the temperature, check the contents of a fridge, and monitor the media consumption of a home remotely. Researchers explore the phenomenon of mediated family surveillance in terms of how it affects trust between children and parents and poses ethical challenges to privacy. At the same time, the effectiveness of these technologies in keeping children safe is put into question (refs). In this paper, we contribute conceptually to the thinking of mediated family surveillance by relating these practices to ongoing debates about the “spectrality” of media and telepresence, as developed in media and cultural studies (Blackman 2019; Kemper 2022). We propose that current mediated family surveillance is giving way to a new style of intimate spectral media, where both comfortable and uncomfortable (perhaps even haunting) caring and loving presences are sustained by networks and data. What needs do such intimate spectral media fulfill for parent and child, and what impositions are involved in being enabled to provide care at a distance (and sometimes also across time zones)? What forms of care at a distance are deemed nourishing, and what forms are horrifying and alienating, and what negotiations take place around the fine line intimate spectral media draw between care and control? By addressing these questions, this paper shows that the debate about how care at a distance manifests and is experienced is also a conversation about the affordances of media, and how care and media shape each other.
For many young adults, going away to university is the time they will have maintained their own household. The skills required to run a household include decision-making around data and device use which can have longstanding repercussions. Examples include decisions around borrowing and spending (generating credit scores), data sharing (e.g., using free services premised on the sale of data ‘fumes’) and data monitoring (e.g., monitoring of health and fitness metrics). Young adults do not come to these data and device practices cold: as children this generation featured in the digital literacy debates, often cast in the role of the “digital native.” Yet in childhood, their devices and data are monitored and in part controlled by responsibilised adults, regulated through parental controls and age-restriction functions at app-level, and managed by strictures about permitted daily screen-time, for example, at the parental-level. Reaching the age of majority and moving out of home signals the shift of the legal and social responsibility of avoidance of online harms from the shoulders of parents and onto the shoulders of young adults. The practices and worries around harm avoidance, however, must be transformed and transferred within families within wider practices of intimacies and care work.
To explore how this happens, this paper analyses discourses of adulthood, responsibility and ‘predictive time’ (Barassi, 2020) in connection to householding practices of young adults living apart from their parents or guardians for the first time. Within this, how young adults ‘separate’ from their parents or guardians in terms of removal of parental controls, deleting (or altering) of tracker apps, and discussions about online safety and data management within the family are focussed on. A focus on university students is theoretically rich from this perspective because of the ‘extended adolescence’ that university students sometimes feel, still protected from some responsibilities of adulthood.
Digital media targeting young children (0-5) is increasingly subject to the sociotechnical process of “platformization” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). Research on this subject has been primarily focused on the role YouTube Kids’ recommendation systems play in the production of video content – often of dubious algorithmic provenance (Bridle, 2017; Burroughs, 2017). Yet there is scant research on the role similar algorithmic systems play in the production of the ever-growing digital market of apps for children. As such, this paper studies how apps for young children are affected by “platformization” and offers a critical analysis of the emerging “algorithmic cultures” (Striphas, 2015) of apps for children.
To understand the relationship between distribution and the production of children’s apps, this paper focuses its attention on a particular app genre that education researchers have critiqued as an unruly “Wild West”: early literacy apps (Guernsey et al., 2012) . From a software studies perspective, I critically scrutinise the platform’s distribution conditions and the “ranking cultures” (Rieder et al., 2018) influencing young children’s educational apps through the empirical analysis of 343 scraped app store search results.
By arguing how the “Wild West” of educational apps is a manifestation of algorithmic cultures, this paper problematizes the role that recommendation systems play in the distribution, access, and production of children’s apps. The discussion reveals several characteristics of the algorithmic cultures of apps for young children, including the perceptible bloating of the genre by generic free-for-download and formulaic app families. Additionally, considering the cultural logic behind this group of apps for children highlights tensions of this double-step mediation process on app stores. First, the centralized role of recommendations as gatekeepers of content for children as a vulnerable population. Second, the challenges platforms pose to digital parenting (Mascheroni et al., 2018) by operationalizing their economic priorities through algorithms.
Discussions of the impact of technological developments often ask questions about the impact of digital innovation on how we act and think. This paper (part of a wider project and programme of work) makes the case for taking seriously how individuals appropriate new technology into their everyday lives.
The use of commercial smart home devices is growing with the increased availability of a variety of devices and their relatively low cost. These devices are used for a variety of purposes, for example energy consumption and home security, and to support activities of daily living (Soubutts et al. 2022). Here, we develop that understanding to explore how parents and their children appropriate voice assistant devices into family life as a dimension of intimacy and care, given that the landscape of care relies on a relationship infrastructure of emotions and caring practices which are often grounded in intimacy born of shared activities (e.g. Gabb and Fink 2013).
The project (funded as part of the ESRC Centre on Socio-Digital Futures) has recruited c15 households to explore their use and views on voice assistants (Amazon Alexa) in the home. In depth, longitudinal data will be collected via 1) contextual interviews with the household members (both parents and children) at the start and end of the study 2) an ‘out-of-box’ interview shortly after adoption 3) transcripts of Alexa commands 4) co-design skills session with families.