Charles Raab on surveillance studies and political science

More guest author stuff (this might actually become a regular thing): Charles Raab blogging for the Political Studies Association on possible contributions of political science to surveillance studies. Not sure what astonishes me more, his - business as usual - brilliant insights or the fact that he is actually BLOGGING :)

4S Annual Meeting - a "surveillance review"

It's been a couple weeks now since the 2013 edition of the 4S Annual Meeting took place in San Diego. Time for a quick guest author's review! The event has been the largest conference organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science so far, assembling over 1.200 attendees in the "Town and Country Resort and Convention Center", and providing the convenient possibility to relax by the pool under palm trees between the sessions.

4S recap

We've been back from 4S for a while now and I think it's time for a little recap of some of the surveillance relevant sessions -- and there were quite a few! Let's say, big data was really BIG this time; it was present even in sessions which didn't have the magic words in the title. It was pretty amazing. Matthias will guest blog about the surveillance panels (yay!), and I'll try to talk a little about the algorithms stuff (which also was about big data) (man, big data! it's everywhere!).

Speaking of Gamification...

As an addendum to my post from yesterday, I just got a call for papers for a thematic issue on "Surveillance, Games, and Play" in my mailbox this morning. It's going to be published in Surveillance & Society. Here's the call:

The gamification of surveillance literacy

There's been a lot of talk about the "gamification of surveillance" within surveillance studies -- computer games collecting and selling personal data without people being aware they're giving away information. Here's what could be considered a counter example: Data Dealer is a game which aims to raise awareness of what information we give away and what people can do with that. I'm going to test the demo version -- for didactic purposes only OF COURSE :-)

(via surveillance-studies.org)

Faceless @ MuseumsQuartier, Vienna

The MuseumsQuartier in Vienna hosts an exhibition which deals with the desire to become faceless in a world which demands our visibility. It shows how works in art, fashion, photography, and advertisment have picked up on that desire to be anonymous - in ways that made me smile, too. Looking at the exhibition website, it really seems like a thoughtfully curated collection which approaches the subject from various angles. (Here's also a brochure with more info)

SSN 2014: Surveillance Ambiguities & Assymetries

Surveillance & Society organises a binannual conference and the next event will take place in April 2014, in Barcelona. All the information and deadlines can be found on the Surveillance Studies Network website. The conference theme, ambiguities and assymetries, seems to capture perfectly an increasingly common notion in surveillance studies: surveillance results from different rationales and has very diverse effects.

What I think the next step is: how to think about rationales and outcomes that are not only diverse, but perhaps vague, difficult to capture and diffuse? For instance, care and control can both be rationales, but what if your informants' rationales do not seem to be so clear cut? How to talk about this in surveillance studies? (I guess I will talk about this in my paper ... )