Wellcome is introducing “positive action” across its funding competitions to tackle underrepresentation in UK academic research. From spring 2024, the Charity may provide additional places on shortlists for researchers who are disabled, or who “identify as being from a Black, Bangladeshi or Pakistani heritage background”

We are excited to say that, continuing a new phase of growth, we are now are seeking a part-time research software engineer, with expertise in AI, machine learning and/or cloud computing, to support the innovative teaching and research activities of the centre. The role includes research software development for interdisciplinary research, other research support and the provision of training to staff and postgraduate students.

See full job description and application here

This collaborative project will explore divergences between principles of responsible AI and the messy reality of AI as encountered in the street, in the form of automated vehicles and surveillance infrastructure. The aim is to ground understandings of AI in lived experiences.

Matt joins the RISCS community with a senior academic fellowship focused on interdisciplinarity in cyber security.

More details here: https://riscs.org.uk/research/riscs-fellows/

An article on “Quali-quanti visual methods and political bots: A cross-platform study of pro- & anti- bolsobots” has just been published in the special issue "Methods in Visual Politics and Protest" of the Journal of Digital Social Research, co-authored by Janna Joceli Omena, Thais Lobo, Giulia Tucci, Elias Bitencourt, Emillie de Keulenaar, Francisco W. Kerche, Jason Chao, Marius Liedtke, Mengying Li, Maria Luiza Paschoal, and Ilya Lavrov.

A new paper, titled “‘View from the window’: On time, politics and domestics during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic” has been published in Time & Society as part of a special issue on the political and transformative uses of time.

A new paper from CIM members Carlos Cámara-Menoyo and Greg McInerny, along with João Porto de Albuquerque, Joanna Suchomska and Grant Tregonning has just been published in Environmental Science and Policy

The paper, "Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations" tackles a particularly significant knowledge gap in the Food-Water-Energy nexus by presenting the experience, decisions and lessons learnt from the co-design process of an interactive tool to visualise these complex interrelations for a particular case: food choices in kindergartens in Poland.

To make the FWE nexus understandable and actionable for the various stakeholders, our approach had two distinctive features: 1) grounding the FWE nexus following a pedagogical/Freirean approach that connects to lived experiences and problematises frames of references to activate transformation; and 2) the use of data visualisations to critically enquiry and learn about the nexus. The combination of these features resulted in data visualisations that “ground” FWE nexus by connecting to lived experiences and problematising frames of references to open transformation pathways.

The outcomes demonstrate a shift in perspectives towards the FWE Nexus that resulted from the design process and the interaction with our visualisation tool. Although further investigation is needed, we see it as a first step to opening new data-enabled transformation pathways to sustainability, not only through improved individual choices, but also by enabling new collective action, change of policies and organisational procedures, as well as new governance arrangements.

We will be having Dr. Mai Elshehaly Link opens in a new windowfrom the giCentre at City, University of London for a talk titled "How Do Decision Makers Use Visualisation? A Population Health Perspective". The talk will take place on Wednesday, March 6th, 14:30 - 16:00 at A0.23 at the Social Sciences buildings.

Post-truth spaces: Studying authenticity and influence on the internet
Richard Rogers
Room: OC1.09; Date: Monday, 11/03/2024; Time: 17:00-19:00.

The global food system is in crisis. Climate change, ecological degradation, and economic and military conflict have exposed significant vulnerabilities in how the world produces, distributes, and consumes food. While governments aim to address these intersecting crises, they typically overlook another critical factor - the unprecedented concentration of corporate control in the global food system driven by contemporary processes of financialization. The incursion of new financial actors and imperatives have encouraged food firms to implement mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to improve financial performance, generate shareholder value, and capture market share. This has resulted in record levels of concentration, with more power controlled by fewer firms. Surprisingly, there is little empirical detail concerning the uneven pace, scale, and geographies of this concentration. Our article develops a novel M&A-based approach to investigate the concentration of power and corporate control throughout the global food system. Drawing from a sample of 4449 M&A deals throughout 2001–20, we reveal the uneven geographical and sectoral characteristics of food systems concentration, showing that the majority of M&A deals are horizontal (within the same sub-sector) and domestic (within the same country). These findings allow us to reflect on when, where, and why corporate control and decision-making power are shifting between different actors and geographies throughout the global food system, ultimately underscoring the importance of bringing finance and financialization into closer dialogue with food systems research.