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.

‘Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’, showcasing different patterns and dynamics of conglomeration: ‘Swiss-Army Knife’ apps that consolidate services in one app, ‘Family’ apps that expand through subsidiaries, and ‘Host’ and ‘Hub’-style apps that leverage external developers. This typology offers a comprehensive understanding of the conglomeration patterns underpinning the rise of super apps, involving corporate, development and international expansion strategies. Ultimately, super-appification represents an intensified form of ‘appification’, as these apps increasingly pervade and commodify various aspects of everyday life, such as payment, insurance, grocery delivery, mobility and travel, with significant sociopolitical implications.

New paper: The De-Perimeterisation of Information Security: the Jericho Forum, Zero Trust, and narrativity

CIM academics Matt Spencer and Daniele Pizio have published their latest paper on their work from the ‘Scaling Trust’ UKRI project. They examine processes of conceptual change in the recent history of the field, focusing in particular on the efforts of the Jericho Forum pressure group to ‘de-perimeterise’ security thinking. The article is open access in Social Studies of Science:
doi.org/10.1177/03063127231221107

Here is a commentary from Meg Davis and co-authors for the somewhat glossy publication, Health: A Political Choice – From Fragmentation to Integration: https://bit.ly/hapc23

The magazine will be published at the World Health Summit, in Berlin, 15–17 October.

Meg's article is "Alternative Futures for Digital Health"

This has a quick turnaround timeframe deadline 17 Jan 2024 and only if funding is still available, a second deadline will be on the 21st Feb 2024. The call is to develop collaboration activity between the UK and EU Associated Countries for Pillar 2 proposals, awards are up to £10K.

The aim of the call is to develop collaborative activity between UK and EU/Associated Countries’ entities in Pillar 2 of Horizon Europe. Applicants will need to identify a specific upcoming call and topic in this Pillar as the focus of their proposed collaboration with the goal of submitting an application to that upcoming call building on this pump priming funding.

Award activity and use of funds must conclude with an interim report by the deadline of the Horizon Europe call being applied to. Awards will be required to provide further reporting on their award, including in relation to the outcome of their application to Horizon Europe.

Funding may be used to support costs for concept or proof of market work and proposal development, costs of meetings, travel and subsistence, research/clerical assistance (based in the UK or internationally), due diligence work on partners, costs towards child or parent care, and contributions towards support services such as proposal writing.

Any questions please contact Lelia Buretia, EU research development Office: lelia.buretia@warwick.ac.uk

As a contribution to the book collection 'The Politics of Replacement: Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars,’ Jack Wilson and Louie Dean Valencia analyse the manifesto and weapons of the individual who perpetrated the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Discussing the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory and the user culture of the platform 4chan – both of which are associated with the individual – they argue that the historical references written on the individual's gun can be situated within historical-national discourses on the topic of ‘Western Civilisation’ in his home country, Australia. Such discourses predate the aforementioned conspiracy theory and platform, and thus the authors argue that situating the individual therein may offer a more comprehensive understanding of their ideological motivations.

Drs. Janna Joceli Omena and Michael Castelle participated in the 3-day conference “Generative Methods — AI as Collaborator and Companion in the Social Sciences and Humanities” held at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, which aimed to explore the multifaceted impact of generative AI as both instruments and objects of research.

We are excited to say that we are starting a new phase of growth. As we plan for the future, we will be making multiple new appointments for an Assistant Professor/Associate Professor/Reader in one or more of the following fields:

1. AI and society, including ethics and governance
2. digital media and/or digital methods
3. environment, ecology and sustainability
4. digital health and society.

See full job description and application here

Join us for an invited talk by Derya Akbaba, Linköping University "Staying with the Trouble: Applying Feminism to Visualization Research" at MS0.5 Zeeman Building on 29th November 2023, 3:00-4:30.

Derya will talk about her research that builds on extant work at the intersection of feminism and visualization by engaging with feminist theories to further trouble common assumptions within visualization research. Click through the title for further details.