Seminar Series Programme
Seminar Series Programme
The Everyday Life of Surveillance
ESRC / Surveillance Studies Network Seminar Series
Seminar 1: ‘Exposure, Subjectivity, Experience.’
April 2008, Department of Sociological Studies, Sheffield.This seminar will explore the experience of surveillance. It will be based on the theme of 'exposure', the process by which individuals are rendered visible by surveillance, and the subjectivities and experience which result. Rather than equating visibility with vulnerability, this seminar will begin to unpack, distil and theorise a broader range of selfhoods, power relations, resistant practices and social relations than hitherto considered in surveillance studies. The aim of the seminar is to produce a framework by which the experience of surveillance can be studied, as part of a range of sociotechnical processes at work in contemporary society. This seminar will run in conjunction with the Surveillance & Society Biannual Conference on the same themes.
Seminar 2: 'Prediction, Anticipation, Pre-emption.'
June 2008, Department of Geography, Durham.As surveillance sensors link ever-more intimately with computerised databases, so the politics of surveillance centre increasingly on issues of prediction, anticipation and pre-emption. Rather than merely recording social behaviour ex post facto, such systems continually scan for known ‘targets’, individuals, groups or behaviours. They then use computer algorithms and profiles to make social judgements predicting, anticipating or pre-empting the future within systems of comprehensive tracking. This theme will explore the political and social implications of a shift towards predictive, anticipatory and pre-emptive surveillance, including simulation, memory and our conceptions of the future.
Seminar 3: ‘Nonhumans, Environment, Biosecurity’
September 2008, Centre for Rural Economy, Newcastle.Monitoring and intervention in nonhuman systems is becoming increasingly prevalent through practices such as disease surveillance, biosecurity, biodiversity conservation, genetic barcoding and other molecular techniques. As we move into an era of molecular biopolitics and environmental upheaval, what lessons – political, conceptual, methodological and ethical – can we learn from studying the surveillance of nonhuman subjects? This seminar will run in conjunction with a major international conference on Global Geographies of Disease Surveillance at Newcastle.
Seminar 4: ‘Governance, Regulation, Control’
January 2009, School of Social and Political Sciences, Edinburgh.This seminar will focus upon existing and prospective ways of limiting, regulating, and governing surveillance. It will examine issues of management and power in surveillance practices and in their control, and will seek to evaluate the instruments and jurisdictional levels at which surveillance is or may be regulated, bearing in mind new developments in technology (e.g., ambient intelligence, mobile technologies) and in business and government policies that are predicated upon intensified surveillance. Incorporating but transcending the question of personal privacy invasions and their regulation, the seminar will explore ways of developing impact assessments for surveillance practices.
Seminar 4: ‘Exclusion, Inclusion, Differentiation’
April 2009, Open University Business School.Two complementary aspects have traditionally dominated understanding of the dynamics of surveillance practice. First in line with Foucauldian theorizing surveillance emphasises the inclusionary nature of social control with its emphasis on disciplinary techniques. In this sense surveillance with its emphasis on self and external regulation, may be said to promote inclusionary forms of control through the coaxing of unruly subjects into docile bodies. However the aim of this seminar will be to the extent to which contemporary surveillance practice is increasingly less concerned with disciplinary forms of control but, is more Deleuzian in its operation, concerned with differentiation, classification and segmentation, aimed at boundary control and exclusion rather than disciplinary transformation.
Seminar 6: ‘Architectures, Spaces, Territories’
June 2009, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle.The final seminar will concentrate on the spatial and territorial aspects of surveillance in a world of global flows of people, things and information, and of pervasive computing technologies. This will bring together both virtual and material ordering in consideration of ideas of speed, post-territoriality, protocol and so on. It will cover forms of monitoring and control as ways of shaping the physical and virtual architecture and landscape (or flowscape) of private and public realms at multiple scales. This seminar will be in conjunction with a conference on architecture, media cities and pervasive computing.
Final Conference
There will also be a separate final conference, particularly to discuss the practical implications of all of these issues with academics, activists, campaigners, industry, law enforcement, policy-makers and regulators, after the conclusion of this seminar series in the autumn or winter of 2009
