Ola Söderström and Sophie Oldfield

Data Politics and New Regimes of Mobility and Control During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

This project aims to analyze how data and code are reshaping mobility regimes, as well as forms of spatial control such as lockdown, during and after the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic. Phenomena such as lockdown regulations, contact-tracing, quarantine control, or social media-based community organizing, lead to the acceleration of digitization in the governing of regimes of human mobilities.

Drawing on urban and critical data studies, this project focuses on the roles of and interrelation between local governments, digital platform corporations, and civil society organizations in the governance of mobility through data. Its central hypothesis is that data politics are central to new mobility regimes, but increasingly contested and often invisible, intertwined in older forms of state governance and corporate strategy.

The transformations of mobility regimes, during and after the pandemic, raise questions regarding democracy, civil rights, as well as the role of the government and corporate actors. The research uses mixed methods to compare the development of digital mobility tracing in the transformation of mobility regimes and forms of lockdown in Cape Town and Geneva.

Project-related scientific publications Select publication   Söderström, Ola and Ayona Datta Data Power in Action. Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis 2023   Törnberg, Petter How platforms govern: Social regulation in digital capitalism 2023