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 ... )

CFP: Cybersecurity & Cybersurveillance

The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) organizes a conference which encourages submissions on cybersecurity and cybersurveillance. I'm becoming more and more interested in cybersecurity, because its technologies are in some ways about the opposite of surveillance technology. Whereas the myth of surveillance technologies suggests they make invisible things visible, some cybersecurity technologies (i.e. cryptography) suggest they can make things invisible and inaccessible: it's all about secrecy. (I hope Richard will tell us more about  cryptography!) The conference is apparently only a day, but it's free, and it's on Bali (!). The call doesn't say much about what exactly they're looking for, but perhaps the past GigaNet conferences can be an indicator. Here's the call:

Lucy Suchman talks about drones @ WZB

Lucy Suchman will talk about her work in progress, which is about drones, on May 22nd at the WZB, Berlin. Exiting stuff! Everyone's welcome, but they ask for registration to help them plan. I'll definitely go (and talk about it here later). Check out the abstract:

University of Amsterdam symposium on transnational bodies

The University of Amsterdam will host a one-day symposium on June 6, 2013: Transnational Bodies. There will be lectures on, among others, forensics, trafficking and violence. I think it resonates with, and might be informative for, what has been written about 'data doubles'. Not to mention the moments in which surveillance actually gets physical and intersects with intervention. This is the invitation:

CRESC Conference: In/vulnerabilities

The CRESC in Manchester will have its annual conference on September 4-6, 2013: In/vulnerabilities and social change: Precarious lives and experimental knowledge. It will be held in London. The CRESC has some great STS-related research programmes, and I think the conference will be a nice mixture of STS and other social science disciplines. Stephen Graham and Isabelle Stengers are among the keynotes peakers. I am excited. Deadline for abstracts: May 10, 2013. 

Stanford Conference May 9 - 10: Governing Technologies

For those in the Bay Area: there will be an interesting graduate conference in Stanford on May 9 & 10. It is called Governing Technologies: Material Politics and Hybrid Agencies. It is definitely 'surveillance friendly' (as I will be presenting - using the concept of exposure!). This is the conference website.

Lectures @ Aarhus University

There's a couple of interesting lectures/discussions on surveillance technologies at Aarhus University, Denmark: