STS Conference Graz: Critical Issues in STS

Here's a call for the STS Conference in Graz, Austria, May 2014. Session 1 (social justice and diversity) and session 7 (the politics of ICTs) might be friendly towards surveillance research.

CFP: The politics of surveillance

Here's an interesting workshop in Canada for surveillance studies focusing on activism. This might be a good opportunity for STS/surveillance scholars working on public engagement issues. There also seems to be an opportunity to publish a paper.

New documentary about drones (streaming)

Unmanned: America's Drone Wars is a documentary directed by Robert Greenwald, presented by the Brave New Foundation. It can be streamed for free here.

The documentary first and foremost shows the devastating impact of drones on the lives of local communities in Pakistan. Furthermore, it presents an extreme case of camera observation from a distance, and the (fatal) assumptions and generalisations that are part of these practices.

Colonial Surveillance

Elia Zureik recently published an article on colonial surveillance (in the Oct/Nov 2013 issue of Red Pepper). Census-taking, finger printing and other forms of colonial oversight, he argues, were a crucial part of constituting and ruling over colonial populations. Not only are these surveillance practices relevant for the colonised word, they also 'spilled over' to the colonising countries. Zureik illustrates this with historical cases (Alfred McCoy's research about the relation between the US and the Philippines), and with contemporary practices (the use of drones by Israel).

4S - 2014 edition

 And it goes on... "The king is dead, long live the king!" Or rather: just as 4S has come off the calendar for 2013, 4S is back on for 2014. Here's the full announcement for Buenos Aires:

CfP: STS in Singapore

News from the Calls front! In short: Global STS, 14-15 March 2014, Singapore, featuring a keynote by Wiebe Bijker, endorsed by 4S, submission deadline 15 January 2014.
Might well be worth looking into!

My day as a data dealer

A while back I stumbled upon a browser game which in some ways could be considered an attempt to gamify privacy literacy. Gamification in the context of surveillance usually means the exploitation of the pleasures of play in order to collect and sell data, i.e. in fitness or productivity apps. In a somewhat similar vein, a group of web developers/hacktivists based in Vienna, Austria, set out to make education about privacy issues more interesting and pleasurable (but I suspect they don’t want to sell the players’ data). The media reactions made me curious, so I spent one Sunday afternoon trying to experience the dark pleasures of big data.