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Computational universalism, or, Attending to relationalities at scale
Södertörn University, School of Natural Sciences, Technology and Environmental Studies, Media Technology. Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7206-2046
University of Washington, USA.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2790-5080
2026 (English)In: Social Studies of Science, ISSN 0306-3127, E-ISSN 1460-3659, Vol. 56, no 3, p. 325-339Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The social sciences and humanities have increasingly adopted computational terminology as the organizing categories for inquiry. We argue that by organizing research around vernacular computational objects (e.g. data, algorithms, or AI) and divided worldly domains (e.g. finance, health, and governance), scholars risk obscuring the universalizing practices and ambitions of computation. These practices seek to establish new relationalities at unprecedented scales, connecting disparate domains, circulating resources across boundaries, and positioning computational interventions as universally applicable. Drawing on intellectual traditions that inspect the fixity of universalizing claims, we problematize the easy adoption of computational categories and argue that they serve as epistemic traps that naturalize the expanding reach of computational universalism. Instead of accepting the hardened categories of our interlocutors, we propose attending to the partial, effortful, and often contested work of translation and commensuration that enables computational actors to position themselves as obligatory passage points across all domains. This approach reveals not only the remarkable achievements of computational relationalities at scale but also their exclusions, betrayals, and partialities. Our intervention aims to spur perspectives that examine how computational actors parse both technical objects and social worlds to advance universalizing ambitions while simultaneously obscuring the enormous labor required to maintain these divisions and connections.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage Publications, 2026. Vol. 56, no 3, p. 325-339
Keywords [en]
universalism, computation, data, algorithm, platform, domain
National Category
Natural Language Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-57891DOI: 10.1177/03063127251345089ISI: 001785710100006PubMedID: 40657790Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105012736818OAI: oai:DiVA.org:sh-57891DiVA, id: diva2:1990156
Funder
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, F23-0070Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, 2019.0235Available from: 2025-08-19 Created: 2025-08-19 Last updated: 2026-07-07Bibliographically approved

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Lee, Francis

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • harvard-anglia-ruskin-university
  • apa-old-doi-prefix.csl
  • sodertorns-hogskola-harvard.csl
  • sodertorns-hogskola-oxford.csl
  • Other style
More styles
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  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
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  • Other locale
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