Evelyn Ruppert

Biography

Prior to academic life, she worked for 11 years as a professional planner and government policy advisor and consultant. She returned to university and completed a doctorate in sociology in 2002. From 2002 - 2008, she was part of an interdisciplinary team (sociology, history, geography) of 12 researchers and government agencies (Statistics Canada and the Library and Archives of Canada) responsible for building a series of databases (microdata, textual data, geocodes) on the 1911-51 Canadian censuses of population. From 2004-8, she was Assistant Professor of Sociology at Trent University (Canada) and from 2009-13 a Senior Research Fellow at CRESC (UK).

Research Interest

I am a Data Sociologist and my focus is on how different socio-technical devices organise and constitute populations as objects of knowledge and governing. I have examined censuses as one such device and extended this to contemporary practices and modes of expertise involved in ‘assembling’ identities through joined up government administrative databases and ‘big data’. I am interested in how these devices enact different kinds of populations and the different forms of power and intervention they invent and make possible. I also examine how government data is used to compile indicators and indices of the performance of populations, how digitised data ‘travels’ and is made public through various government websites, and the devices and methods that are innovated and used to analyse and interpret data. Another area of governance that I have researched concerns how populations are managed through material interventions in cities. In the past I have done this through the analysis of large scale urban remaking projects (The Moral Economy of Cities).