For Whom the Bell Curves

Histories of statistics show that statistics as a knowledge system and set of practices has evolved in interaction with political contingencies. These interactions have been described from the 1700’s to the 1970’s. From the 1980’s onward, faith in social planning has been fading away in favor of renewed liberalism and an individualist ideology. During that same time period our technical capacity to store, retrieve, analyze, and distribute large quantities of data has increased exponentially. At the same time, we have seen an increasing focus on all manner of “risks” – a focus that finds one expression in the generation and consumption of large amounts of statistics. This project aims to study the production and consumption of statistics in this new era o f individualism: To what extent and in what ways are statistics developing new social meanings, production practices, and usage patterns? The project is conceived as a field-comparison study consisting of three fields of endeavor where statistics are prod uced and used and one field of contention, namely population categories within public statistics. Fields have been strategically selected to illustrate different types of tensions between individual and aggregate information perspectives. Two of the field s are mutually parallel and the other two cross-cut these in different ways, thus preparing the ground for an overall cross-field analysis. The work will also be linked through a seminar series, culminating in a cross-field analysis workshop and report.