theory that counts

why run it

• i needed the theory for my own work. the grades research kept running into questions — what counts as a measure, who gets to decide, what happens once a number exists — that other fields have been arguing about for decades.
• reading alone is worse. the texts that matter here are difficult and interdisciplinary, and they open up much faster with people disagreeing about them out loud. some of them i picked because i didn’t want to face them by myself.
• mixing the room was the point. undergraduates ask the questions that faculty have stopped asking, and that turned out to be the most valuable thing in it.

building the syllabus

we ran an application, then assembled the reading list around five recurring themes — classification, objectivity, numbers, data, and metrics & indicators — and rated every candidate text for difficulty and length so a ten-week group with undergraduates in it could actually keep up.

the structural move was pairing: a canonical framing next to a current application, so nobody could treat the theory as settled. igo’s the averaged american alongside contemporary work on the census; mitchell’s rule of experts against writing on humanitarian data and the quantification of need.

what we read

the core of the list, roughly in the order the themes stacked up:

• seeing like a state — james c. scott. the half-negotiable one; everything else argues with it.
• trust in numbers — theodore porter, on where the authority of a number comes from.
• the averaged american — sarah igo, on how “the public” gets constructed and what it means to be known through a survey.
• raw data is an oxymoron — ed. lisa gitelman, on data as generated and curated rather than found.
• the ordinal society — fourcade & healy, on ranking, ordinal citizenship, and inequality.
• the metric society — steffen mau, including the chapter titled, with no ambiguity, the inequality regime of quantification.
• rule of experts — timothy mitchell, on calculation, economy, and post-colonial governance.
• science and african logic — helen verran, on number and certainty.
• a sociology of quantification — espeland & stevens, and what’s new with numbers? — mennicken & espeland.
• the politics of measurement and action — pine & liboiron, the shortest thing on the list and the densest with citations.
• everyday adventures with unruly data — melanie feinberg, on attending to data itself rather than only to algorithms.
• graphesis — johanna drucker, for visual epistemology — and specifically the pages asking what an hour is.
• personal data literacies — pangrazio & selwyn, plus work on the quantified self, which is where the group came closest to my own research.
• the disability studies reader, ch. 1 — on normalcy, power, and the construction of a norm.

bourdieu on classification struggles and hacking’s the taming of chance sat on the list as standing requests. we did not get to everything. that was never really the goal.

the useful question was never “what does this text say.” it was “what would this framework make you go and look at.”

what it fed

this is where a lot of the vocabulary in my grades work got sharpened — data assemblages, datafication, the politics of a metric. it’s also directly upstream of the framing i now use across contexts: measurement as something people navigate, not just something done to them.