Over the last decades, surveillance has transformed into a pervasive phenomenon woven into the fabric of socio-economic life. In this process, surveillance has itself undergone a structural transformation as its principal agents such as prison guards and CCTV operators have been replaced by algorithms and data-driven technologies. Contemporary surveillance then is embedded in, and expression of, a fundamental remaking of the world, where human decision-making is increasingly supplanted by computational mechanisms, and lived experience is mediated, and even constituted, by computation. This thesis is a sociological work with an emphasis on the role of communication at the intersection of computation and surveillance (‘computational surveillance’). Current debates have predominantly focussed on the systems and mechanisms of computational surveillance. Less emphasis has been placed on the lived experience of inhabiting a computed world, and specifically how people can query and act towards computational surveillance. This thesis makes both a theoretical and empirical contribution to this question. Through a framework rooted in the sociology of knowledge, the thesis develops a theory of agency towards computational surveillance. It outlines the changing conditions under which knowledge of social reality is constructed in a computational world and theorises modes of reclaiming these conditions for human agents. This theory informed, and its further development emerged out of the findings from a qualitative study of 40 young people in Germany and the UK about their everyday encounters with computational surveillance, which was conducted as part of the thesis. It highlights how participants obtain knowledge about invisible computational mechanisms through their everyday activities and documents practices through which they collaboratively frame computers as interlocutors that they act towards. Lastly, this thesis documents the tactics and strategies employed by participants to hide from, or manipulate computational surveillance, and how they adopt a logic akin to computers in this process.

Recent advances in conflict studies have led to relatively robust conclusions that inequality fuels conflict when it overlaps with salient group identities. Central to quantitative studies supporting this relationship is a stipulated causal chain where objective group – or horizontal – inequalities are translated into grievances, which in turn form a mobilization resource. All these studies are however limited by their use of objective measures of inequality, which leaves them unable to directly test the assumed grievance mechanism. In four papers I argue that objective asymmetries are not enough to trigger conflict. For people to take action on horizontal inequalities, they will have to be aware of them and consider them unjust. In the first paper, Perceptions, Horizontal Inequalities and Civil Conflict, I use data from the World Values Survey to show that perceived rather than objective economic inequality between sub-national regional groups is associated with increased risk of civil war. In the second paper, Injustice is in the eye of the beholder: Perceived Horizontal Inequalities and Communal Conflict in Africa, I analyse 20 countries covered by the Afrobarometer Surveys. I conclude that combined objective and perceived economic ethnic inequality, political ethnic inequality, and particularly perceived political ethnic inequality, increase the risk of between-group conflict. In the third paper, Expectations, Grievances and Civil Unrest in Emerging Petrostates. Empirical Evidence from Tanzania, I present evidence suggesting that those who feel that their region has been treated unfairly by the government are most prone to support and participate in civil unrest. I base my conclusions primarily on survey data collected in 2015. In a final article, From Silence to Storm. Investigating Mechanisms Linking Structural Inequality and Natural Resources to Mobilization in Southern Tanzania, I rely on 35 semi-structured interviews to argue that natural gas mismanagement triggered group grievances, which in turn fuelled civil unrest.

This thesis explores the discussion of conservative ideas about secondary education in England between 1979 and 1986. Education policy reforms in the 1980s reflected changing ideologies about the role of the state and about the role of education in society. City Technology Colleges (CTCs), proposed in 1986, embodied many of these changes. CTCs were a new type of school within the state system, with control over their own funding, admissions and operations; they were intended to have a technology focus within a broad curriculum and were partially funded and managed by industry sponsors. The CTC programme is relevant to the study of the history of education for two reasons: because of the relationship of the CTC policy to the general discussion of ideas in an important period of reform; and because of its legacy in the policies that followed. This thesis adds to the historical narrative about the 1980s discussion of different conservative education policy ideas concerning choice and diversity, the aims and purposes of education, and funding and management. This thesis also considers the influence of ideas discussed by external groups on internal Conservative Government policy discussion. The similarity of ideas and language between the external and internal discussions indicates the important contribution of interest groups to the intellectual atmosphere in this period. This thesis connects these ideas to those that informed the CTC policy. The elements of the policy and the ideas referenced by actors introducing the policy are examined to determine how they reflected prominent contemporary thinking. This thesis draws on archival and published documents and on a few interviews. The findings underscore the role of certain key actors in the development of the CTC policy as well as the consistency of ideas used by conservatives throughout this period, including those that underlay the CTC policy.

In this thesis, I investigate spatial aspects of education and family economics. In the first chapter, I explore the effect of voucher school competition on pupil achievement in Chile. Specifically, I create spatial indices to measure spatially determined competition: a choice index which counts the number of schools that are accessible from a given municipality; and a competition index which summarizes the choice index for a given community of students. The chapter tests the hypothesis that schools which spatially compete more are also more efficient. The results show no effect of spatially determined competition on value added. I discuss how the absence or slow response of parents to “poorly performing” schools and a “too low” voucher can be proposed as two of the causes of the poor functioning of the voucher system. In the second chapter, I exploit a police report on occupied schools in the socalled Chilean Winter—a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations, which started in early June of 2011—and test the hypothesis that a decrease in attendance has a causal effect on reducing students’ performance in standardized tests. My evidence indicates that the performance of pupils affected by missed days from school dropped to nearly 0.18σ, which is sizeable in terms of human capital accumulation. In the last chapter, I produce the first quantitative evaluation of maternal surrogacy. I exploit variation in surrogacy legislation in every US state over time and study surrogacy’s causal effect on vital statistics such as marriage, divorce, births and out-of-wedlock births. Using arguably exogenous changes in legislation to identify the causal impact of surrogacy, I show that one additional standard deviation in the surrogacy rate causes an increase of 0.05σ in the number of marriages and of 0.04σ in the number of divorces. It also causes a decrease of -0.02σ in births and of -0.03σ in out-of-wedlock births. The three chapters introduce novel results that advance current knowledge and should be carefully considered by policy makers in these areas.

This thesis is concerned with how political activists in Lebanon maintain political engagement when at every moment it appears easier for them to give up. Within such an ethnographic context of ‘failure’, it grapples with how a political subjectivity predicated upon the desire for radically transformative action is produced and maintained. It contends that political subjectivity comes about through political engagement, not prior to it, and contours the experiential basis of political activism in its wake. To account for how activist political subjectivity is maintained, this thesis looks to the key roles played by politicised emotions and diffuse solidary feeling states in making the political and social worlds activists inhabit sensible. It attends, too, to the significance of intense moments of protest in producing and maintaining an activist political subjectivity: in the experience of protest, in its continued circulation after the fact in narrative form, and in the effects it has on the temporality of future action. As such, the thesis makes use of an event-centred methodology to better account for the transformative potential of action. The distinctive theoretical contributions of this thesis are fourfold: 1) to show how the passionate and experiential dimensions of activism are fundamental rather than epiphenomenal aspects of the political, contributing to the broader interdisciplinary study of mobilisation, activism, and radical politics; 2) to argue ethnographically that affect is not and can never be pre-social – and is as such an anthropological object of analysis – thereby adding to more recent anthropological scholarship on affect; 3) to show how overlapping temporal circuits and senses of self-in-time make activists ‘affectable’ in particular ways at particular moments, contributing to the growing anthropological literatures on historicity and temporality; and 4) to demonstrate the importance of an event-centred methodology for anthropological engagements with transformative action.

During the last decade, donors and the development community have engaged in the promotion and implementation of performance-based management and accountability systems in developing countries. In particular, it is believed that giving more power to the lay person to directly monitor the performance of his government thanks to the use and publication of quantified performance indicators could improve the social accountability of government organisations and therefore their efficiency. As various research conducted in developed countries has shown, there is often a disjuncture between the expected and actual impacts of these systems, and their implementation often leads to unintended consequences which can make them inefficient. To understand this disjuncture, a better understanding of the social mechanisms through which these systems operate is required. However, little is known of these mechanisms. This research aims at filling this gap, in the particular context of developing countries, based on the study of the Community-Based Monitoring and Evaluation System initiative (CBMES) in the Iganga District of Uganda. The research provides a thorough analysis of the progressive emergence of managerial social accountability in the aid sector, of which the CBMES is a representative example. The social mechanisms underpinning the CBMES are subsequently identified and explained as the results of complex interactions between meanings, norms and power relationships. Two significant observations emerge from the research. First, in order to operate, community monitors of the CBMES progressively enter into an implicit agreement with local civil servants, which simultaneously facilitates and constrains their actions. Second, the CBMES gradually drifts away from formal, performance-based monitoring to informal, relation-based monitoring. These two elements de facto turn the community monitors into assistants, rather than monitors, of local government officials. The research accounts for why and how the observed implicit agreement and drift emerge.

Slum upgrading is a planning intervention where the state, in the process of upgrading an informal space, is seen as delivering tenure security to the residents in that space. This dissertation investigates the making legible of an informal space in Nairobi by analysing the processes and outcomes of a slum upgrading project and the consequent impact on tenure security. Using a qualitative, case study approach, I begin by analysing the production of the Korogocho slum and the practices that contributed to the production of the informal space. Next I examine two processes within the slum upgrading intervention aimed at making legible the space and the people, processes that are distinctively grounded in modernist planning: preparing a physical plan and conducting enumeration. I show how during these processes different rationalities, or ways of knowing, are continually meeting, contesting and negotiating, leading to hybridized outcomes. While the planning intervention has made some aspects of the space legible, it has reduced the legitimacy of some use claims on the space, particularly those of sole structure owners. Further, only certain subpopulations are made legible; long-term tenants, particularly those that are youth born in the settlement, are pushed further into illegibility and tenure insecurity. Within this analysis, I discuss how residents in the settlement propose how the two processes could have been implemented to lead to legibility that matched their ways of knowing. My findings illustrate that planning interventions that are predicated on technocratic solutions need to be balanced with an understanding of the everyday dynamics, or rationalities, of residents in informal spaces. I argue that tenure security needs to be conceptualised as the outcome of negotiated practices between actors taking place in a particular type of space rather than the outcome of planning practices used by the state to guarantee tenure security or used by urban residents to contest or fight for it. In addition, I argue that slum upgrading needs to move attention beyond tenure regularization to other components of tenure security, including those for the various categories of tenants in order to match their needs.

By the time children in the UK start school there is already an achievement gap between those from low income households and their better‐off classmates. One explanation for this is differences in parenting. This has increasingly been the focus of policy interventions under successive governments, where the emphasis has shifted towards parenting rather than poverty as explaining poorer children’s worse outcomes. In this context this thesis examines how the two factors, poverty and parenting are related and what mechanisms explain these relationships, specifically testing the Family Stress Model. Using the Millennium Cohort Study a range of different experiences of economic hardship are analysed in relation to different parenting behaviours when children are aged five. The findings show that it is not straightforwardly the case that low income parents parent worse, and there are some positive (as well as negative) differences in parenting between mothers with low and median incomes. For some of the negative differences in parenting these are part of a broader income‐parenting gradient that extends all the way up the distribution. When other experiences of hardship are examined (such as debt, deprivation and feeling poor) they are more strongly and negatively related to parenting behaviours, compared to income. It is found that mothers’ mental health and relationship quality are mechanisms for most parenting behaviours and are particularly important for how close the mother feels to the child, play activities and discipline. Experiencing a worsening of material deprivation is associated with a worsening of a number of parenting behaviours and changes in experiences of hardship are also related to changes in mothers’ mental health and life satisfaction. These findings highlight the importance of financial resources for parenting and suggest that any policies aimed at improving parenting in order to improve the outcomes of poor children need to address families’ economic situation, as well as mothers’ mental health and relationship quality.

The informal economy represents two-thirds of worldwide employment (OECD 2009) and contributes more than 40% of global GDP (Schneider et al. 2010). It is an especially significant feature of urban labour markets in the Global South, having been a persistent phenomenon in all regions, and expanding in the wake of economic growth in Latin America and Asia in recent decades (OECD 2009). Governmental policies toward the informal economy have taken various forms based on several theoretical approaches (Chen et al. 2001, WIEGO 2014). These range from repressive policies that perceive informal entrepreneurship as a drag on economic growth and poverty reduction, to those promoting their legalisation to foster economic development and others encouraging informal workers’ organisation to resist capitalist forms of exploitation. More recently, strongly supportive municipal initiatives have been put in place to increase informal productivity. This study aims to understand the rationality behind, and the impact and limitations of this emerging supportive policy approach aimed at improving the livelihoods of informal entrepreneurs. It analyses these practices using a mixed-methods approach (ethnography complemented with statistical analysis), on the basis of primary data drawn from 97 face-to-face interviews and focus group discussions, together with a randomised questionnaire survey of 906 workers conducted with the collaboration of a team of field assistants across three informal subsectors in Santiago de Chile: waste-pickers, street vendors and home-based enterprises. In light of the evidence, I argue that granting informal entrepreneurs the right to succeed through municipal support effectively promotes the social and economic inclusion of vulnerable populations. Municipal policy support, in the form of training, capitalisation, access to markets and organisation, can be key to speeding up the growth of enterprises otherwise condemned to stagnation or limited expansion. As part and parcel of this argument, I contend that supporting informal entrepreneurs is vital in a situation in which informal entrepreneurship typically becomes a ‘one way street’ in the absence of decent employment alternatives in the lower tiers of the formal economy. My thesis also suggests that understanding formal-informal linkages can benefit from a selective amalgamation of divergent theoretical approaches, as these two markets operate both in integration (as per structuralist and legalist perspectives), a structure commonly described as exploitative, and separately in a parallel network of informal enterprises (as per dualist perspectives), described as a fairer alternative for informal enterprises to trade products. In light of my findings, I offer concrete suggestions for further improving the nature of municipal policies and the necessity for higher-level supportive approaches to fully unlock the informal economy’s potential.

I present a new methodological approach to measuring news bias, aiming to settle the disagreement on how to define and measure bias in media and communication studies in this thesis. Unlike earlier research on TV news or newspapers, I choose international news agencies’ coverage of the Ukraine crisis in this study as a case to highlight the strength of the new approach. Utilizing newly-developed geographical news classification and sentiment analysis techniques, I analyse news coverage of the Ukraine crisis by Russia’s official news agency, ITAR-TASS, along with the independent news agency, Interfax, over two years to estimate partisan news bias resulting from stateownership. In this longitudinal content analysis, I focus on the change in sentiment of ITAR-TASS’s news coverage of Ukraine relative to Interfax’s coverage during periods following six key events in the crisis. The analysis shows that the sentiment of ITAR-TASS’s news on Ukraine’s democracy and sovereignty changed significantly after key events, reflecting the desirability of these events to the Russian government. ITAR-TASS’s news coverage became the most negative when the new Ukraine government launched military operations against pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine, claiming that the revolution was instigated by Ukrainian fascists, who threatened the safety of ethnic Russians. This result indicates that the Russian government utilized the news agency for international propaganda to justify its actions. Further, an additional content analysis including western news agencies revealed that Reuters’s news coverage of the Ukraine crisis during this period was strongly correlated with ITAR-TASS, being influenced by the Russian government’s false statements on Ukraine. Reuters news stories were circulated internationally, and published in the most popular news sites in the United States without context. I argue that the publication of the Russian government’s false narratives by American online news sites through Reuters indicates the vulnerability of today’s international news gathering and distribution system, and the rapidly changing relationship between states and corporations in the global news industry. This suggests that western news agencies’ use of temporary correspondents in covering rapidly developing international crises increases the risk of spreading false information globally. In this case, western news agencies are, in effect, supporting international propaganda by non-western states.