Dr Morgan Currie, Senior Lecturer in Data and Society in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS), presents ‘Selling Universal Credit: The Data Imaginary of Real Time Information’.

This talk examines the claims made by policy makers about a key technology underpinning the payment system of Universal Credit, the UK’s largest social security payment: the Real Time Information (RTI) system. I draw on the theoretical framework of the data imaginary – how people mobilise the promises of data and algorithms to use technology in tactical ways fitting their goals and interests. Here, temporality is a particular facet of the data imaginary, as RTI promises to speed up the flow of data on work activity, creating a more responsive system for better decision-making. Lawmakers saw RTI as allowing them to assess claimant job outcomes, a key metric for measuring policy success, and as a new form of control by optimising people’s incentives to work and by mitigating error and fraud. We also find fragmenting opinions by MPs towards Universal Credit after the roll-out as constituents complain that RTI data is inaccurate and the Universal Credit system punitive. Even as Universal Credit is continually contested, policy makers successfully mobilise the RTI data imaginary to support their arguments for introducing Universal Credit.

Speaker

Science, Technology and Innovation Studies

Dr Morgan Currie is Senior Lecturer in Data and Society in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS) at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests focus on open and administrative data, automation in the welfare state, and activists’ and everyday data practices. She co-organises the Critical Data Studies Cluster in the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/news-events/event/wrong-turns-government-data

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