It’s been a while since the last conference recap – so here
we go again! Surveillance studies has been a multi-disciplinary field from the
outset, and particularly geographers have investigated the production and
transformation of space through techniques of surveillance and control.
At this year’s edition of the Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference in London, Matt Finn and Nat O’Grady organized a double panel
on “The co-productions of data-based living” (1) (2), seeking to explore the effects of
computational infrastructures on the organizational transformation and
re-configuration of lived experience, the formation of new modes of governance
and intervention, and forms of mediation between humans and data – thereby of
course dealing with multiple core surveillance studies questions.
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| Lunch break at the RGS-IBG building garden |
Both Rob Kitchin and Andrés Luque engaged the concept of
“smart cities” and the changing rationalities of governance that emerge through
the measurement and quantification of almost every aspect of urban life, while
Matt Finn gave an empirical account of data-driven schools, in which students
as well as teachers become enrolled in data-regimes that set individualized
performance goals in order to maximize “care” as well to clear future career
paths, thereby introducing a form of educational governance through
self-optimization.
In a similar vein, Ewa Luger and Chris Speed’s presentation
on reconstruction of the family home through smart objects, as well as Matthew
Wilson’s inquiry on the “quantified self-city nation” probed questions of
identity and the self, and how they become transformed through streams of
information. Finally, Agnieszka Lesczczynski problematized issues of interfaces
between data-enabled technologies and their human users through which social,
technological and spatial experiences become mediated. I chipped in with a piece
that sought to make sense of the moment of the decision as something that is
co-constituted, but necessarily not determined by data-driven knowledge.
Themes of surveillance (or rather, dataveillance) and
control were of course implicitly running through all the talks, which
unanimously emphasized the interactive and emergent nature of co-produced
living through ubiquitous and pervasive calculative architectures. As someone
who was part of the RGS conference for the first time, I was not exactly surprised
but still somewhat amazed how cross-cutting the surveillance studies agenda has
become, now that we supposedly live in that ominous age of “Big Data” – and at
the same time I feel that geographical literature can indeed contribute to a
better understanding of how we can make sense of a digitized world (and in turn
how this digitized world makes sense of us). I will be back!
[as always, this recap reflects my personal experiences and
my own very limited perspective on an incredibly large event of which I could only grasp a small bit]
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