Category: academic

Civil liberties in Britain

In February, the Convention on Modern Liberty will be taking place in cities across the UK and online. Unfortunately I will still be in Brazil and there are no listed events in Newcastle, which is a great shame – I would certainly have been organising some. This is an issue that tends to cross party lines and unite people of all political persuasions, so I hope as many people as possible in the UK get involved…

The Guardian newspaper´s Comment is Free site also has a special section set up for the event called Liberty Central. Surveillance Studies Network and Surveillance & Society were supposed to be listed there (they contacted us), but they aren´t yet…

New study on social networking and surveillance

One of our collaborators on the new Living in Surveillance Societies (LiSS) project, Christian Fuchs, from the eTheory Research Group of the ICT&S Center – Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society at the University of Salzburg in Austria, has an interesting-looking new study out on social networking and surveillance. You can also find more information about the study here.

Just like me, Christian also has a blog on wordpress – although he hasn’t updated it much recently (I know that feeling!) – and runs an open access online journal, tripleC (cognition, communication and cooperation). Check them out…

Brazilian surveillance research 1

On the subject of Brazilian Internet surveillance, I would just like to draw people’s attention to some of the other surveillance studies scholars with whom I will be working with here, starting with Fernanda Bruno. Fernanda is a Professor in the Postgraduate Programme in Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has a blog on surveillance issues here. I first came across Fernanda when we published a really interesting piece she wrote with Paulo Vaz on self-surveillance back in the ‘Foucault and Panopticism Revisited’ special issue of Surveillance & Society back in 2003.

Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America Symposium

Some people are probably wondering what I am actually doing here. I sometimes feel like am not quite sure myself, but I will write more on my research over the next few days. One thing my hosts and I are doing is organising the first gathering of surveillance studies scholars in Brazil, the symposium on Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America here at the Pontifical Catholic University of Parana, Curitiba. Hopefully this will form the nucleus of the Surveillance Studies Network in Latin America. We’ve selected 46 papers for presentation, although actually we could do with some more Spanish language contributions… we may issue another extended call soon.