Tuesday, January 28, 2014

CfP: Questioning security devices

Security dialogue is putting together a special issue on security technologies in the broader sense of devices used for security purposes (including paper files). I don't know the journal too well, but the call does seem perfect for folks working at the intersection of STS and security/surveillance. Deadline for abstracts is February 15, 2014. Here's the original call:

CPDP14 - a surveillance recap

After the recent flurry of Calls, here's another conference recap with relevance to STS and surveillance studies. This year's edition of CPDP, which took place in Brussels last week, was indeed heavily coined by the “Snowden revelations” and the ensuing international political debates on PRISM, Upstream, and whatnot. Thus, while CPDP13 had its main scope on the (still ongoing) reform of the European data protection framework, this year it was all about the relationship between privacy (and data protection) and security and surveillance. Highly intriguing! [oh, and just to respond to an emerging theme of the STSS repository: there was pleasantly little explicit talk of “Big Data” - however it was of course always implicitly present as the specter that haunts contemporary discourses on privacy and data protection :)]

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

CRISP doctoral school

The Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy (CRISP) will have its second doctoral school on June 16-24 in Milton Keynes, UK. Francisca, Matthias and I had the pleasure to go last year. It was fantastic, because beyond discussing our doctoral research, it also inlcuded sessions on publishing, funding, and engagement with the media, as well as a bunch of lovely people. The deadline for applications is March 14. Here's a list of activities this year's doctoral school will include, and you can find out more on their website:

CfP: Politics of ICT

Here's one of the calls of the Graz conference on critical issues in STS that I posted here a while back. Sounds great for people who conduct research into algorithms, big data, development processes of surveillance technology, and the like. The deadline for abstracts is approaching soon, but here it is:

CfP: Data & Discrimination

Here's another one about data (this time without the "big" in the title). The call sounds great though, it's about one of the core questions of surveillance studies and focuses on discrimination. It seems that it's organized by communication scholars. Here's the call:

New Journal: Big Data & Society


I've had this in my inbox for a while but didn't get around to posting it, so here it is. There's a new journal relevant to both surveillance studies and STS; and guess what: it deals with big data. It's called Big Data & Society, and is a peer-reviewed, online-only, open access journal. I think it's fantastic that they want to fully exploit the possibilities of the digital format, i.e. by linking tohether different kinds of audiovisual media, or by including forms of knowledge beyond the traditional academic article (i.e. blogs). Here's an excerpt from their about page: