A data-based participatory approach for health equity and digital inclusion: prioritizing stakeholders.

This article starts from the premise that projects informed by data science can address social concerns, beyond prioritizing the design of efficient products or services. How can we bring the stakeholders and their situated realities back into the picture? It is argued that data-based, participatory interventions can improve health equity and digital inclusion while avoiding the pitfalls of top-down, technocratic methods. A participatory framework puts users, patients and citizens as stakeholders at the centre of the process, and can offer complex, sustainable benefits, which go beyond simply the experience of participation or the development of an innovative design solution. A significant benefit for example is the development of skills, which should not be seen as a by-product of the participatory processes, but a central element of empowering marginalized or excluded communities to participate in public life. By drawing from different examples in various domains, the article discusses what can be learnt from implementations of schemes using data science for social good, human-centric design, arts and wellbeing, to argue for a data-centric, creative and participatory approach to address health equity and digital inclusion in tandem.

The first bite: Imaginaries, promotional publics and the laboratory grown burger.

In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world's first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution - the promotional public - to characterise the affirmative and partial patchwork of carefully selected actors invoked during the burger tasting. Our account draws on three areas of analysis: interview data with the scientists who developed the burger, media analysis of the streamed press conference itself and media analysis of social media during and following the event. We argue that the call to witness an experiment is a form of promotion and that such promotional material also offers an address that invokes a public with its attendant tensions.

Real social analytics: A contribution towards a phenomenology of a digital world.

This article argues against the assumption that agency and reflexivity disappear in an age of 'algorithmic power' (Lash 2007). Following the suggestions of Beer (2009), it proposes that, far from disappearing, new forms of agency and reflexivity around the embedding in everyday practice of not only algorithms but also analytics more broadly are emerging, as social actors continue to pursue their social ends but mediated through digital interfaces: this is the consequence of many social actors now needing their digital presence, regardless of whether they want this, to be measured and counted. The article proposes 'social analytics' as a new topic for sociology: the sociological study of social actors' uses of analytics not for the sake of measurement itself (or to make profit from measurement) but in order to fulfil better their social ends through an enhancement of their digital presence. The article places social analytics in the context of earlier debates about categorization, algorithmic power, and self-presentation online, and describes in detail a case study with a UK community organization which generated the social analytics approach. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this approach for further sociological fieldwork in a digital world.

Remediating politics: brand(ed) new sexualities and real bodies online.

This article suggests that, in a world emerging in and through mediation, branded sex bloggers and portals become (re)mediators of queer and feminist politics. It examines the websites of two porn production companies, Nofauxxx and Furry Girl, and analyses how they respond to older media forms, re-articulate long-standing debates about pornography in new mediated environments, and re-signify the pornographic object. Key in this process is the circulation of "authenticity," "real bodies," and "diversity" discourses. Through this circulation, sex blogger/brand portals mediate models of queer and feminist political engagement entrenched with notions of digital networks and free markets more generally.