Category: conferences

Global Governance of Post-Smart Cities workshop

I am decompressing after our Global Governance of Post-Smart Cities workshop last week: a fabulous few days of discussion at the intersection of space, cities, political economy, history, media and technology. There was no audience, no preconceived outcome, just some of my favourite scholars brought together for a few gorgeous autumn days in Ottawa to talk about ideas. This is what academia should be about but very rarely is.

The concept of the “post-smart city” is a deliberately provocative term, which I and several others have proposed, and which I am exploring in my current research. What I am trying to capture here is the plethora of different things that seems to be emerging out of the concept of the smart city, e.g. Platform Cities, AI Cities, Super Cities, Cognitive Cities, right through to weirdness like the Network State, and the bringing then together with libertarian and national projects for new cities as permanent experiments. I am thinking of “post-” very much in the sense of “post-modern” or “post-structural” in which the “post-” doesn’t indicate that the thing has been superseded but that it includes and builds on it taking it in new directions. However, I am also thinking of Latour’s critique that “we have never been modern.” Maybe we are in a post-smart situation, but have never really been smart… In any case, as a provocation for discussion, it worked really well in this context.

The main sessions were as follows:

  • “Zones of Interest” – Neoliberal Cities
  • “My Own Private Idaho” – Libertarian Cities
  • “From the Internet, Up” – Platform and Media Cities
  • “Fitter, Happier, More Productive…” – From Smart to AI Cities
  • “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss” – (Post-)Colonial Cities
  • “Cleaner, Greener, Meaner…” – (Un)Sustainable Cities
  • “A New Life Awaits You in the Offworld Colonies” – Extraplanetary Cities

I originally gave a prompt for each and encouraged the leaders of each session to do what they wanted with the subject. In the end, most adopted a fairly conventional presentation and discussion format, and the discussion was great but I am wondering how to do things even more differently next time:

There was a also a public event, on the first evening of the workshop, Rethinking our Futures in an Age of Crisis, featuring Quinn Slobodian, Ayona Datta, Orit Halphen and Nick Couldry in conversation with me. There will be further reflections and eventually a full report published by CIGI Online.

An enormous thank-you to…

My co-organizers: Vincent Mirza and Azadeh Akbari.

Those who accepted our curious invitation: Rowland Atkinson, Ilia Antenucci, Yung Au, Kelly Bronson, Nick Couldry, Raymond Craib, Federico Cugurullo, Ayona Datta, Mehdi Ghassemi, Orit Halpern, Olivier Jutel, Roger Keil, Casey Lynch, Tim Maughan, Kevin McMillan, Carolyn Prouse, Renée Sieber, Isabelle Simpson, Quinn Slobodian, Alina Utrata, Niloufar Vadiati, Catherine Vandermeulen, Dwayne Winseck, Liam Cole Young.

CSS/Lab and CLTS grads and postdocs: Jennie Day, David Eliot, Zimo Meng, Claire Wang, Aiden Bradley and Gabriella di Biaggi.

Those who wanted to be here but were unable to come because of inequitable visa and immigration systems and the climate of fear: Hend Ali and Ahmed M Eleish.

Our funders: SSHRC-CRSH Connection Grants, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and the Research Center for the Future of Cities, and the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS), both at the University of Ottawa.

Climate and the Working Academic

Part of the (re)growing night train network in Europe

I’ve been a environmental activist since I was in my teens. I stood for the Green Party as a student, I was a direct action activist against road-building, illegal logging on Indigenous lands, and much more. I’ve never learned to drive a car, and that was entirely deliberate. We built a Passive House, and are aiming at a net-zero life (you can read more about that here).

But there is one aspect of my life as a working academic that is difficult to reconcile with this, and that is flying. Air travel is one of the worst sources of greenhouse gasses and it’s even worse because the emissions occur higher in the atmosphere. And yet, academics fly a lot. Partly this is about conferences – scholarly associations do love to have their events scattered all over the world – but partly it’s about research – we have to go to places to do observation, interviews etc. etc. – don’t we?

Well, perhaps not. Or perhaps we are not being imaginative enough. The pandemic has shown that many smaller seminars and workshops can happens perfectly well via the internet, and with VR, that’s only going to improve. I don’t think our Surveillance Studies Centre seminars, which have been entirely virtual this year, have been worse, indeed we’ve been able to invite people from further afield than we would normally do. I’d also argue that a lot of more distant research visits could be replaced by a combination of internet connection and on-the-ground work carried out via partnerships with local researchers.

I don’t think we can replace the magic of face-to-face interaction and chance meeting and discussion entirely. But we can minimise the environmental damage we do. A lot of this is strcutural and therefore it is a matter for funding agencies, scholarly associations and universities. We should be seeing research funding taking into account excessive travel proposals when evaluating grant applications etc.

But I think it is also necessary that we take personal action, especially those of us who in the most priviledged academic positions. My personal climate pledge is this: I will take no more than one long-haul return flight a year from now on –– forever. I’m not going to be doing lots of short-haul flights either –generally speaking, I will take none– but I do leave open the possibility that I would take one very occasionally.

This is ‘inconvenient’ but it just means I have to take decisions about what I do, when, and where I go. For example, I know the Surveillance & Society / Surveillance Studies Network Conference is every two years, in Europe. This means I can plan for a month-long conference / research and friends and family visit trip in 2022: I’ll be doing 4 conferences (ICA – Paris, SSN – Rotterdam, EuroS&P – Genoa, Beyond Smart Cities – Malmo), a mountain marathon in Leichenstein, and visiting family & friends in the UK, all by train (mainly night trains) and ferry. 2023 will have to be a family trip to Japan, but could also involve a significant research visit.

If I’m invited anywhere else overseas outside of this, I will either insist on virtual presentation or if that is not possible, I will just turn it down. I’ve been working out how to get to places I might need to go in Canada and the USA. It’s possible to get to most major cities by train. You just have to accept it’s going to to take longer, but since you can work on trains, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the worst part of it is generally the Canadian elements: Canada desperately needs to invest in its railways and espcially in frequency and speed. It’s ridiculous that you can’t get to Montreal or Ottawa from Kingston much before midday. Anyway, we’ll find out how well this is going to work when I go to New York by train via Montreal, in April next year.

Now, who’s going to join me?

SSN 2014 Barcelona

SURVEILLANCE: AMBIGUITIES AND ASYMMETRIES

HOSTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA AND SUPPORTED BY THE SURVEILLANCE STUDIES NETWORK

Thursday 24th – Saturday 26th April 2014

Contemporary surveillance is characterised by ambiguities and asymmetries. Surveillance results from different desires and rationales: control, governance, security, profit, efficiency but also care, empowerment, resistance and play.

Furthermore it can have both positive and negative outcomes for individuals and these may lead to intended or unintended consequences. Surveillance is never neutral. Surveillance is always about power and that power is increasingly asymmetric. Surveillance practices are also changing and as ‘smart’ surveillance systems proliferate utilising and generating ‘Big Data’ new forms of ambiguity and asymmetry arise. In this context the conference wishes to explore the key themes.

Check our registration guidelines and fees.

Please contact the conference organisers with any questions: ssn2014barcelona@surveillance-studies.net

Negotiating (In)visibilities

There’s an interesting new research network called ‘Negotiating (In)visibilies‘, one of those fascinating interdisciplinary collaborations (or collisions) that spans architcture, urban studies, cultural studies, arts and information (and probably). I’ve been asked to be an advisor and will also be giving one of the keynotes at what looks to be a really great opening confererence in Copenhagen, February 1-2 2012. Should be fun!

CFP: RGS-IBG 2012

Royal Geographical Society-Insitute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) Annual Conference, Edinburgh UK, 3-5th July 2012.

Call for papers, sponsored by the Surveillance Studies Network / Surveillance & Society

“Surveillant Geographies”

Convened by David Murakami Wood (Queen’s University, Ontario) and Steve Graham (Newcastle University)

In this era of risk and security, surveillance is intensifying, expanding, rescaling and reterratorializing. New  organisational practices, new technologies and new spaces of surveillance are replacing, adding to or overlaying existing forms. Surveillance is becoming something that is far removed from the binaries of State/Citizen, Public/Private or Self/Other. Surveillance is both being globalized and at the same time enables neoliberal economic globalization and military power projection. But beyond this there is a complex and contingent spatiality and temporality to surveillance. Nation-states and national cultures still matter, however, the most significant differences are not national. Surveillance is increasingly not only targeted at the unwilling masses, but is something embraced by a mobile global elite to ensure the predictability and safety of in the spaces in which they live and work. Specialized marketing combined with revanchist redevelopment are generating material and virtual sociospatial forms that come with surveillance ‘built in’. At the same time, globalization means a shift to more fragmented, uneven and dangerous spaces for many, where what is not seen matters as much as what is. There is an emerging geography of secure and surveilled enclaves counterposed to spaces of exclusion and disappearance, at every scale. Surveillance is also becoming a feature of everyday interpersonal practice through social media and consumer culture, and this too has complex relationships with the construction of space.

We invite submissions on any aspect of the geographies of surveillance. Key topics could include:

The globalization, reterritorialization and rescaling of surveillance
Critiques of dominant theorizations of surveillance, and new directions from / in geography
Comparative studies of surveillance
The political economy of surveillance
Surveillance, intelligence and the ‘war on terror’
Emerging geographies of surveillance, e.g. social networks, online gameworlds etc.
Historical geographies of surveillance
Surveillance and culture(s)
Reaction and resistance to surveillance
Geographies of openness, transparency and exteriority
Geographies of closure, privacy and interiority

Please send a title and short abstract (max. 250 words) by Friday 20th January 2012 to the session organisers, David Murakami Wood (dmw@queensu.ca) and Steve Graham (steve.graham@ncl.ac.uk)

Security and Surveillance session at AAG 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 24-28 February 2012, New York

Geographies of Security and Surveillance

Convened by David Murakami Wood, Queen’s University, Ontario, and Steve Graham, Newcastle University UK.

This session will provide a space for the discussion of the growing interest in geographies of security and surveillance. We welcome submissions on any aspect of this broad area, but would particularly encourage papers on:

  • International comparative studies of security and surveillance
  • The political economy of security and surveillance
  • Surveillance, intelligence and the ‘war on terror’
  • The globalization, reterritorialization and rescaling of security and surveillance
  • Critiques of dominant theorizations of security and surveillance, and new directions from / in geography
  • Emerging geographies of surveillance and security, e.g. social networks, online gameworlds etc.
  • Historical geographies of security and surveillance
  • Security, surveillance and culture
  • Geographies of openness, transparency and exteriority
  • Geographies of closure, privacy and interiority

Potential presenters should first register for the meeting at: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/register_to_attend

They should then send their name, affiliation, conference ID number, and a 250-word abstract to David Murakami Wood

The deadline for submission is: 21st September 2011

Successful submitters will be notified before 28th September 2011, when the full session will be submitted to the AAG

Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar – deadline approaches!

Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
16 – 21 May 2011
Application deadline: 11 February 2011
APPLY NOW

The Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar provides an intensive, multi-disciplinary learning experience that addresses key issues of surveillance studies in ways that enhance the participants’ own research projects, as well as providing a unique national and international networking opportunity.

“International and cross-cultural diversity of the participants is one of the strengths of the seminar. Because surveillance studies are related to social justice, equality, and power, it is crucial to have the perspectives from the world of non-English speaking people.” –2007 SSSS participant

“Quality of faculty and attendees was excellent; social events well planned and spaced; location and setting excellent; well-planned and organized throughout.” –2007 SSSS participant

CORE FACULTY:
David Lyon, FRSC, Professor and Queen’s Research Chair, Department of Sociology, and Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen’s University, Canada

Valerie Steeves, Associate Professor of Criminology, University of Ottawa, Canada

David Murakami Wood, Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Queen’s University

THE PROGRAMME:

The core of the seminar is group work, each facilitated by a member of seminar faculty. Groups will grapple with key issues in surveillance studies, including issues such as “The researcher as surveillance agent,” “Gaining entry into surveillance sites,” “Making international comparisons,” “Connecting social science with policy and legal fields” and so on. Participants are encouraged to comment, in their statement of interest, on what areas are of particular interest. The rest of the programme is devoted to theoretical, methodological and professional issues, and to open interaction with established scholars in the field. The idea is to “go behind” conference and book performances to discover how and why surveillance researchers do what they do.

There will be no assessed tasks and no credit for enrolling in the seminar, although a letter confirming your completion of the seminar will be provided.

FEES AND SUBSIDIES:

The fee for the 2011 SSSS is $700 CAD. Applicants should pursue funding opportunities before submitting their application.
The Surveillance Studies Centre (SCC) will award up to three Summer Seminar tuition subsidies to non-Queen’s graduate student registrants who can demonstrate financial need. Click here for more information.
The Surveillance Studies Network Global Scholar Award (SSN) will award up to three bursaries of £500 (500 GBP) each to SSSS participants from less developed or developing countries who are in need of financial assistance. Click here for more information.
The deadline to apply for both subsidies is 11 FEBRUARY 2011.

—
Joan Sharpe
Project Administrator
Surveillance Studies Centre
c/o Dept of Sociology
Queen’s University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6
Canada
(613) 533-6000, ext. 78867
(613) 533-6499 FAX

Twitter @sscqueens
http://www.sscqueens.org
http://www.newtransparency.org

Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar 2011

If you’re a PhD student (or thereabouts) studying surveillance, you might be interested in the Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar that we run out of the Surveillance Studies Centre here at Queen’s every two years.

The SSSS is “an intensive, multi-disciplinary learning experience that addresses key issues of surveillance studies in ways that enhance the participants’ own research projects, as well as providing a unique national and international networking opportunity”.

The next one will be in from 16 – 21 May 2011, here in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The tutors will be Professer David Lyon, Professor Val Steeves, and myself. If you want to come, you need to get your application in by 11 February 2011. There are even some funding sources available both internally from the SSC and externally from the Surveillance Studies Network, for those in financial need. More details here…

Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life: Call for Participation

Call For Participation: Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life

Digitally mediated surveillance (DMS) is an increasingly prevalent, but still largely invisible, aspect of daily life. As we work, play and negotiate public and private spaces, on-line and off, we produce a growing stream of personal digital data of interest to unseen others. CCTV cameras hosted by private and public actors survey and record our movements in public space, as well as in the workplace. Corporate interests track our behaviour as we navigate both social and transactional cyberspaces, data mining our digital doubles and packaging users as commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Governments continue to collect personal information on-line with unclear guidelines for retention and use, while law enforcement increasingly use internet technology to monitor not only criminals but activists and political dissidents as well, with worrisome implications for democracy.

This international workshop brings together researchers, advocates, activists and artists working on the many aspects of cyber-surveillance, particularly as it pervades and mediates social life. This workshop will appeal to those interested in the surveillance aspects of topics such as the following, especially as they raise broader themes and issues that characterize the cyber-surveillance terrain more widely:

  • social networking (practices & platforms)
  • search engines
  • behavioural advertising/targeted marketing
  • monitoring and analysis techniques (facial recognition, RFID, video analytics, data mining)
  • Internet surveillance (deep packet inspection, backbone intercepts)
  • resistance (actors, practices, technologies)

A central concern is to better understand DMS practices, making them more publicly visible and democratically accountable. To do so, we must comprehend what constitutes DMS, delineating parameters for research and analysis. We must further explore the way citizens and consumers experience, engage with and respond to digitally mediated surveillance. Finally, we must develop alliances, responses and counterstrategies to deal with the ongoing creep of digitally mediated surveillance in everyday life.

The workshop adopts a novel structure, mainly comprising a series of themed panels organized to address compelling questions arising around digitally mediated surveillance that cut across the topics listed above. Some illustrative examples:

  1. We regularly hear about ‘cyber-surveillance’, ‘cyber-security’, and ‘cyber-threats’. What constitutes cyber-surveillance, and what are the empirical and theoretical difficulties in establishing a practical understanding of cyber-surveillance? Is the enterprise of developing a definition useful, or condemned to analytic confusion?
  2. What are the motives and strategies of key DMS actors (e.g. surveillance equipment/systems/ strategy/”solutions” providers; police/law enforcement/security agencies; data aggregation brokers; digital infrastructure providers); oversight/regulatory/data protection agencies; civil society organizations, and user/citizens?
  3. What are the relationships among key DMS actors (e.g. between social networking site providers)? Between marketers (e.g. Facebook and DoubleClick)? Between digital infrastructure providers and law enforcement (e.g. lawful access)?
  4. What business models are enterprises pursuing that promote DMS in a variety of areas, including social networking, location tracking, ID’d transactions etc. What can we expect of DMS in the coming years? What new risks and opportunities are likely?
  5. What do people know about the DMS practices and risks they are exposed to in everyday life? What are people’s attitudes to these practices and risks?
  6. What are the politics of DMS; who is active? What are their primary interests, what are the possible lines of contention and prospective alliances? What are the promising intervention points and alliances that can promote a more democratically accountable surveillance?
  7. What is the relationship between DMS and privacy? Are privacy policies legitimating DMS? Is a re-evaluation of traditional information privacy principles required in light of new and emergent online practices, such as social networking and others?
  8. Do deep packet inspection and other surveillance techniques and practices of internet service providers (ISP) threaten personal privacy?
  9. How do new technical configurations promote surveillance and challenge privacy? For example, do cloud computing applications pose a greater threat to personal privacy than the client/server model? How do mobile devices and geo-location promote surveillance of individuals?
  10. How do the multiple jurisdictions of internet data storage and exchange affect the application of national/international data protection laws?
  11. What is the role of advocacy/activist movements in challenging cyber-surveillance?

In conjunction with the workshop there will be a combination of public events on the theme of cyber-surveillance in everyday life:

  • poster session, for presenting and discussing provocative ideas and works in progress
  • public lecture or debate
  • art exhibition/installation(s)

We invite 500 word abstracts of research papers, position statements, short presentations, works in progress, posters, demonstrations, installations. Each abstract should:

  • address explicitly one or more “burning questions” related to digitally-mediated surveillance in everyday life, such as those mentioned above.
  • indicate the form of intended contribution (i.e. research paper, position statement, short presentation, work in progress, poster, demonstration, installation)

The workshop will consist of about 40 participants, at least half of whom will be presenters listed on the published program. Funds will be available to support the participation of representatives of civil society organizations.

Accepted research paper authors will be invited to submit a full paper (~6000 words) for presentation and discussion in a multi-party panel session. All accepted submissions will be posted publicly. A selection of papers will be invited for revision and academic publication in a special issue of an open-access, refereed journal such as Surveillance and Society.

In order to facilitate a more holistic conversation, one that reaches beyond academia, we also invite critical position statements, short presentations, works-in-progress, interactive demonstrations, and artistic interpretations of the meaning and import of cyber-surveillance in everyday life. These will be included in the panel sessions or grouped by theme in concurrent ‘birds-of-a-feather’ sessions designed to tease out, more interactively and informally, emergent questions, problems, ideas and future directions. This BoF track is meant to be flexible and contemporary, welcoming a variety of genres.

Instructions for making submissions will be available on the workshop website by Sept 1.

See also an accompanying Call for Annotated Bibliographies, aimed at providing background materials useful to workshop participants as well as more widely.

Timeline:

2010:

Oct. 1: Abstracts (500 words) for research papers, position statements, and other ‘birds-of-a-feather’ submissions

Nov. 15: Notification to authors of accepted research papers, position statements, etc. Abstracts posted to web.

2011:

Feb. 1: Abstracts (500 words) for posters

Mar. 1: Notification to authors of accepted posters.

Apr. 1: Full research papers (5-6000 words) due, and posted to web.

May 12-15 Workshop

Sponsored by: The New Transparency – Surveillance and Social Sorting.

International Program Committee: Jeffrey Chester (Center for Digital Democracy), Roger Clarke (Australian Privacy Foundation), Gus Hosein (Privacy International, London School of Economics), Helen Nissenbaum (New York University),
Charles Raab (University of Edinburgh) and Priscilla Regan (George Mason University)

Organizing Committee: Colin Bennett, Andrew Clement, Kate Milberry & Chris Parsons.

University of Toronto & University of Victoria.