CFP: Moving towards Ubiquitous Surveillance?

This is an international and interdisciplinary conference coordinated by the University of Leeds' Leeds Humanities Research Institute, the Institute of Communications Studies and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Applied Ethics. 

The conference follows on from last year's highly successful 1st Ethics of Surveillance Conference with the question "Moving towards Ubiquitous Surveillance".

We pleased to be able to confirm as keynote speakers:

Prof. Christian Fuchs
Professor of Social Media at the University of Westminster's Communication and Media Research Institute and the Centre for Social Media Research

Dr. Kirstie Ball
Reader in Surveillance and Organisation at the Open University Business School, Milton Keynes

Dr. Mark Andrejevic
Deputy Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia

Prof. Charles Raab (provisional confirmation)
Professor of Government at the University of Edinburgh School of Social and Political Science

Contact: [email protected].

Conference coordinators
Founders of the research group IC ICTs: Research Group on ICTs, Surveillance & Society
http://icicts.wordpress.com/

The Leeds Humanities Research Institute (LHRI)
The Institute of Communications Studies (ICS)
The Centre for Interdisciplinary Applied Ethics IDEA CETL

Call for Papers

Papers are invited for the 2nd conference on the Ethics of Surveillance to be held at the University of Leeds from 24th-25th June 2013, beginning with a lunch on Monday and ending after lunch on Tuesday.

Recent years have seen rapid technological advances in the field of information and communication technologies (ICTs), with increasingly powerful computers moving into devices so small they are becoming invisible. The accelerating digitization of surveillance means surveillance technologies have been developing along a parallel trajectory. Ubiquitous computing is becoming increasingly synonymous with invisible surveillance, raising a number of ethical questions which the 2nd Ethics of Surveillance Conference aims to shed light on.

This conference will bring leading scholars from the fields of Surveillance Studies and Critical Theories of ICTs together to discuss the current state of the art in state and corporate surveillance and debate the questions driving their current research.

Possible lines of inquiry include, but are not limited to:

Theorizing surveillance:
In current scholarship on surveillance the concept of “monitoring” is used with increasing frequency to make allowance for the surveillance of non-human entities (machines, animals), but also to preclude what some argue to be the inherently negative meaning of surveillance.  What conceptual work needs to be done to arrive at an adequate theorization of surveillance activity? What is the place of normative questions in this debate?

• Is surveillance intrinsically bad or can surveillance be a positive activity?
• David Lyon has argued (following on from Oscar Gandy’s idea of panoptic sorting) for an understanding of surveillance as social sorting. Does surveillance constitute a harm in itself or does it merely facilitate harm?

Post-panopticon?

The emergence of a series of post-panoptic metaphors show a strong desire to escape the gravity of the panopticon model and networked technologies such as the internet are invoked to challenge the mono-centricity and the mono-directionality of the power relationship characterizing Bentham’s prison design. To what extent is this justified?

• To what extent do the most recent developments in surveillance technologies and what has been described as the “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty & Ericson 2000) really challenge this model?
• New surveillance technologies, it is argued, yield new modes of resistance. It is in this context that sousveillance and hacking are seen as rendering rendered the panoptic metaphor obsolete. To what extent do these new forms of resistance really challenge the asymmetry of the panopticon?

Towards invisible surveillance:

The rise of ubiquitous computing means surveillance is moving beyond the visible into barely perceptible devices (e.g. surveillant landscapes, smart dust). This means that even where there is a reasonable expectation NOT to be under surveillance, new surveillance technologies make it possible to place someone under surveillance without their consent or even their knowledge.

• What are the ethical and legal issues arising from these new covert forms of surveillance?
• From a technology perspective, what does ubiquity but invisibility of surveillance technologies afford and to whom?

Beyond individual privacy

Ethical reviews of surveillance technologies have to date focused largely on privacy and data protection issues. Privacy however in itself remains an underdefined term, often conflated with data protection and philosophical appraisals oscillate between substantive and contextual approaches. What is more, privacy has to date focused largely on the level of individual
subjective experience. However, profiling practices both for national security and corporate purposes are largely interested in gathering data concerning larger groups such as ethnic minorities, members of political groupings etc.

• How can we move beyond privacy in debates about surveillance and human rights?
• Is there a right to privacy that goes beyond the right of the individual to a right for group privacy?
• How can we theorize the subjective experience of individual surveillance but also the subjective experience of group surveillance?

The surveillance relationship – from human to non-human watchers: As the increasing use of the term “monitoring” in surveillance contexts shows, there is a need to theorize the technology-driven changes in the surveillance relationship between the watcher and the watched: where surveillance originated as a human/human interaction, advances in computing
technology are increasingly replacing the human with a non-human entity and it is estimated that approximately 95% of data gathered is never seen by a human eye.

• Do these changes in the surveillance relationship merit a switch from surveillance to monitoring and what are the risks associated with this re-conceptualization?

The surveillant assemblage and towards a more holistic surveillance studies: The move towards what Haggerty and Ericson have called the “surveillant assemblage”(2000) is almost complete as the boundaries between formerly discreet surveillance contexts - consumer surveillance, national security surveillance and workplace surveillance – are becoming increasingly fluid. Individuals traverse these social settings on a daily basis, hence a “holistic” approach to the study of surveillance is becoming increasingly urgent.

• What are suitable research methods that grasp this holistic surveillance?
• To what extent are there still different registers of subjective experience in these merging surveillance contexts?

We invite papers that approach the above and related issues from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Deadline for submission of a 200 word abstract is the 1st of May 2013, speakers will be informed by 15th May. Please submit abstracts and related queries to [email protected].

The closing event on day 1 of the conference will be a panel discussion amongst our keynote speakers on “The Place of Normative Critique in Surveillance Studies”.