Imperial College London
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ProfessorHelenWard

Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health

Professor of Public Health
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 3303h.ward Website

 
 
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Location

 

311School of Public HealthWhite City Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Day:2023:10.1080/1600910X.2022.2098352,
author = {Day, S and Lury, C and Ward, H},
doi = {10.1080/1600910X.2022.2098352},
journal = {Distinktion},
pages = {167--194},
title = {Personalization: a new political arithmetic?},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2098352},
volume = {24},
year = {2023}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation of probabilities. Our proposal is that the categories, numbers, and norms of this political arithmetic have changed in a ubiquitous culture of personalization. Today’s political arithmetic, we suggest, produces a different kind of society, what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the ‘default social’. We address this new social as a ‘vague whole’ and propose that it is characterized by a continuous present, the contemporary form of simultaneity or way of being together that Benedict Anderson argued is fundamental to any kind of imagined community. Like the society imagined in the earlier arithmetic, this vague whole is an abstraction that obscures forms of stratification and discrimination.
AU  - Day,S
AU  - Lury,C
AU  - Ward,H
DO  - 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2098352
EP  - 194
PY  - 2023///
SN  - 1600-910X
SP  - 167
TI  - Personalization: a new political arithmetic?
T2  - Distinktion
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2098352
UR  - https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000907247600001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=a2bf6146997ec60c407a63945d4e92bb
UR  - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2098352
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/109030
VL  - 24
ER  -
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