A Crisis of Opportunity: Market-Making,Big Data,and the Consolidation of Migration as Risk

Crisis narratives surrounding Europe’s 2015 migration influx fuelled demands for new ways of tracking, mapping and predicting human mobility. We explore how market opportunities for technology firms and data analytics start-ups created by the EU’s Global Approach to Migration led to solutionistic approaches to compiling and analysing migration statistics. We show that initiatives such as the rebranding of existing platforms and services as migration prediction systems are consolidating policy conceptualisations of migration as risk. Despite the promise of greater granularity, this “big data approach” cannot offer greater certainty about who is on the move and why. Instead such approaches are ill-suited to understanding the complex dynamics of migration and to offering protection to vulnerable people. The marketisation of migration statistics through big data offers a key case for advancing progressive approaches to both migration statistics and global data justice.     

The Evolution of Ethnographic Research Methods: Curiosities and Contradictions in the Qualitative Research Literature

This article evaluates six recent contributions to the literature on ethnographic research methods. Four concern collecting and analyzing texts, one introduces the use of textual and numerical data, and one illustrates the use of quantitative methods for qualitative data. The first four books reveal that current thinking in qualitative methods continues to privilege inexplicit criteria for data collection and analysis despite recognizing that explicit criteria work best. The last two books show how to effectively integrate qualitative and quantitative data in ways that resolve these contradictions.     

建国初期社会救助体系的构建与评析--以1949～1953年的广州市为个案

建国初期,中共在广州构建了一个过渡性的社会救助体系,在短短的4年内,广州市通过它救助了大量的失业者和城市贫民,基本上遏制了由于新旧转轨带来的社会危机,为新政权即将展开的社会主义各项建设奠定了基础.在救助理念和救助过程上,它体现了以往社会救助的一些特点,同时也反映了我党的诸多特色,诸如鲜明的意识形态性、广泛的群众参与性和严格的组织纪律性,隐隐约约闪烁着以统一调配为主要特征的计划时代社会政策的影子.