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call: Mentorship program 2023

The Surveillance Studies Network mentorship program is calling for faculty members and PhD students who are interested to participate as mentors and mentees, respectively. One faculty member mentor will be paired with one PhD student mentee whose research concerns surveillance for a one-year period. 

The time commitment for faculty is minimal, but the program greatly assists surveillance scholars in developing their scholarship and networking with established scholars in the field. 

Over the one-year period, each pair will have a minimum of two discussions via phone or video chat. The focus of the discussions can be determined individually by each pair, but they might cover the mentee’s research or research interests, related literature, the academic job market, or other matters relating to their career. Please note that, as an informal mentorship arrangement, the program is intended only as a supplement and not a replacement to students’ pre-existing supervisor/mentorship relationships. 

If you are interested in participating, please email Mentorship Coordinator Oliver Kayas (o.g.kayas@ljmu.ac.uk) with your name, contact information, and up to five keywords of research interests. We will do our best to match faculty members and PhD students who share similar interests. 

Note: It is expected that PhD students participating in the program will become SSN members if they are not already. 

We look forward to hearing from you. 

Best wishes,

Dr Oliver Kayas


Call for Participation (SSN Oregon 2023): Oregon Surveillance Studies Workshop 2023

The Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) and our local hosts and sponsors (the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication and Oregon State University’s School of Communication) are pleased to invite you to join us in person or online for the upcoming SSN Oregon 2023 conference in Eugene, Oregon, USA. The conference is being held on October 13-14, 2023. The conference will include workshops for works-in-progress papers on a variety of surveillance topics as well as some plenary/keynote roundtable discussions and an exciting social event (more details soon).

We have opportunities for you to participate in person or remotely if you are not able to come to Eugene! We are now seeking expressions of interest for discussants/commenters who will provide prepared comments on each paper at the conference and help lead the sessions. We will have fully remote and in-person sessions (which we hope will also be accessible for remote participants), and would love to have all of you participate as discussants even if you can only attend and do so remotely.

If you are interested and willing to serve as a discussant, we invite you to complete the survey (https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ey9XReTUXJqWyAm) to indicate which papers you might be interested in commenting on during the conference.

More updated details about the conference are at https://blogs.uoregon.edu/ssnoregon2023/.

We look forward to having you join us for the conference in person or remotely as your circumstances permit.

Sincerely,

Bryce Newell and Josh Reeves

SSN Oregon 2023 Co-Chairs


Surveillance Studies Network 2023 Book Award

The Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) invites nominations (including self-nominations) for the annual Surveillance Studies Book Award. The award is given in recognition of an outstanding monograph on surveillance published during the preceding year. 

We are currently inviting nominations for 2023 (i.e., books with a ‘2022’ copyright date).

Single or multi-authored works are eligible, but not edited volumes. 

The winner will receive an award amount of £100 (to be split among authors if there is more than one), as well as a 1-year membership for the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN), which provides benefits including discounts on all SSN-sponsored conferences and events. The winner/s will be announced in late 2023 / early 2024.

Using the subject heading “SSN Book Award 2023,” please email the committee chair, Jonathan Finn (jfinn@wlu.ca) to nominate a book. Please include the title of the book, year of publication, author, publishing house, and a paragraph of no more than 250 words detailing specifics about why this book would be suitable for the award.

All nominations must be received by 1st September 2023. 

Please do not send any books at this stage. The committee will solicit books directly once all nominations have been received. 

SSN Book Award Committee Members:

Dr. Jonathan Finn, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

Dr. Özgün Topak, York University, Toronto, Canada

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef, Texas Tech University, United States

Dr. Minkyu Sung, UNIST, Korea

A list of previous winners can be found here.


CFP for Workshop: The ‘Surveillant Assemblage’ In the Age of AI

Pre-conference workshop: November 14, 2023 | Malmö, Sweden

Workshop website: https://wasp-hs.org/the-surveillant-assemblage-in-the-age-of-ai/

Organizing Committee:
Marie Eneman, Mikael Gustavsson & Jan Ljungberg 
Department of Applied Information Technology
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Keynote speaker: Professor Bernd Carsten Stahl
Bernd Carsten Stahl is Professor of Critical Research in Technology at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham and former Director of the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

The workshop is organized in connection with the main conference AI for Humanity and Society November 14-15, 2023: https://wasp-hs.org/events/ai-for-humanity-and-society-2023/ 

Introduction:
It has now been over 20 years since Haggerty and Ericsson’s (2000) seminal work on surveillant assemblages was published where they departed from the argument that two metaphors ‘Big Brother’ (Orwell, 1949) and ‘Panopticon’ (Foucault, 1977) had dominated the discussion of the contemporary developments in surveillance at the time. In this workshop, we will critically reflect on how the surveillant assemblage can be understood in our contemporary society and what dominates the current societal debate. Developments in digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) are laying the ground for surveillance capabilities of a magnitude we have never seen before, extending the intensity and scope of surveillance, to become more powerful, ubiquitous, and embedded in our daily lives. It should be emphasized that the emerging digital surveillance technologies should not be understood as individual tools related to certain practices, but rather a convergence of earlier discrete surveillance technologies into the surveillant assemblage. The introduction of surveillance provides high expectation of increased efficiency and security in society, while generating a set of tensions and dilemmas related to policy-making and regulation to protect fundamental democratic values and rights such as privacy and freedom of expression. The development of the powerful surveillant assemblage relates to an interplay of different factors such as:

  • A rapid, technical development of surveillance devices that collect information on citizens, e.g., stationary surveillance systems (CCTV), body-worn cameras, drones, biometrics such as facial and object recognition, secret data interception and a variety of sensors.
  • Increased platform surveillance as dominant pervasive social structures.
  • Availability of a large amount of data that comes from digital platforms and a plethora of personal digital services, such as social media, smart phones, GPS, and health apps, constituting a huge repository of information about citizens and their activities, readily available for use in surveillance, marketing, and political campaigning also known as dataveillance and surveillance capitalism.
  • Developments in AI and machine learning, advances the analytical step in surveillance, for both historical, real time and predictive analysis. A topical example is the controversial facial recognition app Clearview AI, based on a large volume of images of individuals scraped from social media.
  • Increased mandate for authorities to conduct surveillance e.g the new Swedish legislation ‘Secret Data Interception’ enabling the police to use “hacking” as a work method.
  • The intricate interplay between public and private actors, e.g. how government logics of interest to increase security in society are entangled into market-driven logics for capital and its consequences for how government work is organized.
  • Increased risks for fundamental democratic rights as privacy and freedom of expression, which raises important questions related to how rights as privacy can be conceptualized in relation to AI surveillance and how privacy can and should be protected.
  • The new EU proposal called ‘Chat Control’ which would enable mass surveillance of citizens in the EU, motivated by expectations that it will contribute to fight crimes.The proposal suggests that all internet service providers in the EU should be forced to monitor all communication on their platforms using Chat control’s algorithms.

Objectives with the workshop
The core aim of the workshop is to provide a platform and bring together researchers and other relevant stakeholders such as law and policy-makers, practitioners and developers to critically discuss issues related to surveillance and privacy in our contemporary society. In Sweden and within the EU, there is currently a strong political will and pressure to further extend the mandate for state and private actors to use surveillance motivated by the need to increase efficiency and security in society. This raises important questions on how the potential with emerging technologies can be used responsibly to increase security in society while protecting fundamental democratic values such as privacy and freedom of expression. The workshop welcomes a broad audience – researchers, law and policy-makers, practitioners and developers.

Registration and submission
Welcome to submit an extended abstract of 1000-1200 words (excluding the reference list) related to the workshop theme on critical issues related to the contemporary development of surveillance in society. The abstract should be emailed to marie [dot] eneman [at] gu.se with the subject surveillance workshop no later than August 15.

Submission deadline: 15 August, 2023
Notification:  22 August, 2023

Please note that in order to participate in this workshop you must also register for the main conference. Registration for the conference opens on 15 August.

Other:
WASP-HS is considering publishing a collection of papers from the workshops as a joint volume. Please direct any of your questions about the workshop to main organizer: Marie Eneman at – marie [dot] eneman [at] gu.se


Open Call for Future Surveillance Studies Network Conferences

Surveillance & Society and the Surveillance Studies Network are seeking Expressions of Interest for hosting our biennial conference in 2026, 2028 and beyond. 

We are looking for universities and research institutes with accessible venues, which can host a 3-day conference for at least 300 people, with at least 6 streams of parallel sessions every day, and an additional doctoral colloquium preceding the main conference. Ideally, we would also want the entire conference to be hybrid and available online.

We will accept EoIs until 2 months before the prior conference – so the end of March 2024 will be the deadline for EoIs for the 2026 event. Then the announcement of the next venue will be made at the conference.

Please note that our conference helps to fund SSN, which is a UK-registered educational charity, that owns and publishes Surveillance & Society.

Please send all EoIs to David Murakami Wood, david <dot> mw <at> uottawa <dot> ca


Surveillance & Society Readership and Citations

Are you interested in which articles are being cited and downloaded from Surveillance & Society?

We have just updated our Readership and Citation section for 2023, including a Top 30 Most Cited Articles, a Top 30 Most Read Articles, and a Top 20 Trending Articles (pieces published over the last two years). 

Available here: https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/readership


Surveillance Studies Network Arts Prize 2024

The Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) is dedicated to the study of surveillance in all its forms. It promotes innovative and multidisciplinary work on surveillance, including research that bridges different academic fields, furthers the understanding of surveillance in wider society, and informs information policy and political debate. As a registered charitable company, the SSN is committed to the free distribution of scholarly products, including the publication of Surveillance & Society, the leading peer-reviewed journal dedicated to surveillance studies.

As part of its mandate, the SSN seeks to encourage creative and artistic practices engaging with the topic of surveillance. As such, the Surveillance Studies Network Arts Prize is a bi-annual award that recognizes and publicly supports artwork centred on critical readings of surveillance. Following the success of its previous Arts Prizes in 2018, 2020, and 2022, the SSN is delighted to announce the call for nominations to the 2024 competition.

Award

All submissions are adjudicated by a committee composed of members of the SSN board. The award for first prize is £250 and up to three honourable mentions will receive £100. Additionally, the winner and each honourable mention will receive a fee waiver for conference registration at the forthcoming SSN Conference (location and date TBA) in summer 2024, as well as coverage in a Surveillance & Society forum and the blink blog discussing the work. Travel support may also be available, funds permitting. Winning artists will also receive an invitation to showcase their work, or a representation of it, in a virtual exhibition during SSN’s 2024 conference. 

Please note that, due to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, the format of the 2024 SSN conference and thus the administration of the Arts Prize may be subject to change to accommodate changing public health measures.

The nominated work must be an original art project that was produced or exhibited in the 2020, 2021, or 2022 calendar years. The following criteria will be used to adjudicate the nominations:

·   demonstrates a thematic fit with the critical orientation of the Surveillance Studies Network and Surveillance & Society;

·   exhibits theoretical sophistication;

·   produces new and unique ways of thinking about modes of surveillance;

·   and promotes audience engagements.

Deadlines and Forms

The call for nominations closes on 15 July 2023 at 11:59pm EST, with the selected artworks announced in December 2023. To nominate an artwork for the upcoming competition, please download and complete the following form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ENj5aqOI5EBhoZe-4xvk8JJesr930F8lbWT8mmetkPA/edit 

Self-nominations are welcome.

For further information, please contact Julia Chan, Arts Committee Co-Chair at julia.chan@ucalgary.ca and include the heading “SSN Arts Prize.”

*Submission forms are hosted by Google. For a PDF version, please send a request to julia.chan@ucalgary.ca with the heading “SSN Arts Prize form—PDF request.”


Announcement: mentorship progamme

Dear Colleagues, 

The Surveillance Studies Network mentorship program is calling for faculty members and PhD students who are interested to participate as mentors and mentees, respectively. One faculty member mentor will be paired with one PhD student mentee whose research concerns surveillance for a one-year period. 

The time commitment for faculty is minimal, but the program greatly assists surveillance scholars in developing their scholarship and networking with established scholars in the field. 

Over the one-year period, each pair will have a minimum of two discussions via phone or video chat. The focus of the discussions can be determined individually by each pair, but they might cover the mentee’s research or research interests, related literature, the academic job market, or other matters relating to their career. Please note that, as an informal mentorship arrangement, the program is intended only as a supplement and not a replacement to students’ pre-existing supervisor/mentorship relationships. 

If you are interested in participating, please email Mentorship Coordinator Oliver Kayas (o.g.kayas@ljmu.ac.uk) with your name, contact information, and up to five keywords of research interests. We will do our best to match faculty members and PhD students who share similar interests. 

Note: It is expected that PhD students participating in the program will become SSN members if they are not already. 

We look forward to hearing from you. 


Call for tender: SSN 2024

Invitation to host Surveillance Studies Network 10th Biennial Conference 2024 

The Surveillance Studies Network invites expressions of interest to host the 10th Biennial Conference in 2024. The conference brings together scholars, artists, and activists working broadly in the area of surveillance. It has become increasingly popular year on year and always receives a very positive response from the community. Now in its 10th iteration, we are delighted to be inviting expressions of interest to host the next conference in 2024. More information about previous conferences can be found here: https://www.surveillance-studies.net/?page_id=4.

Outlined below is a draft specification for what hosting the conference would require and an indicative budget. If you and your institution would be interested in hosting the conference on this basis, we invite you to submit an expression of interest (EOI). Your EOI should contain information about your institution, your capacity and experience in administering such events, why you want to host it, an estimated conference preparation timeline, what added value you bring (especially why your institution would be an attractive venue to prospective delegates), how accessible the conference venue is (both in terms of being accessible for those with special needs, but also convenient access to mass transit and transportation hubs), and a number of proposals for the conference theme (the conference should have a broad theme so as to be attractive to the diverse range of disciplines and topics that fall under the surveillance studies umbrella). You should also include indicative costs for room hire, daily delegate catering rate, local admin support, delegate packs, technology costs, and website development. SSN especially welcomes bids from the Global South. The Directors of SSN will choose the venue for the 2024 conference based on a review of the submitted EOIs.

If you are interested in submitting an EOI or if you have questions please get in touch with David Murakami Wood, chair of the SSN2024 Organizing Committee, to receive the full application pack: david.mw@uottawa.ca

Please send your expression of interest to host SSN2024 to ssn@surveillance-studies.net and david.mw@uottawa.ca.

Basic specifications for host institution

Date:                                     May or June 2024    

Duration                              3.5-4 days

Capacity                               250-person capacity Lecture Theatre with full AV, plus a minimum of 7 fully AV equipped rooms available nearby with 60+ capacity each. At least 2 of the rooms including the main Lecture Theatre should be online-ready to support virtual/hybrid streaming of the events in those rooms.

Language                             The language of the conference is English.

Atrium/Foyer                     To cater for lunch/tea and coffee breaks/art installations – near to breakout room

Catering                               3 X teas and coffee per day, 1 X buffet lunch per day, plus a          conference dinner      .

Accommodation:              It is easier if delegates arrange their own accommodation at local hotels but this requires the venue to be a reasonably large city. If the host institution can arrange accommodation that is fine, but we would advise against this because the administration can be difficult, and it often requires a firm block-booking months in advance and payment up front.

Conference organisation

The conference organising committee consists of:

  • At least  three SSN Board members (including one SSN Director)
  • Two or three members of the host institution (one of whom will be the conference director)

The SSN members of the committee will support the host institution in providing feedback and advice during regular organizing committee calls. Final decisions about the conference theme, registration fees, budget, programme, etc., will be made by the organizing committee. SSN will be responsible for determining the keynotes, award ceremonies of SSN prizes and promoting the conference.

Structure of conference:

A 3.5-4-day conference should enable two plenary sessions and 6-7 streams of parallel sessions each day.

Poster sessions or other activities to encourage Master and Doctoral student involvement in the conference, and are encouraged.

Additionally, the proposal and development of a doctoral student colloquium as part of the overall program is required. This could occur, for example, in the morning or afternoon prior to the regular conference.

The Host institution would be responsible for:

  • Reporting on budget, planning, and preparation milestones to SSN in advance of the conference
  • Developing and running the conference website
  • Securing lecture rooms, break out rooms, meal facilities, and catering on time
  • Creating an online conference paper archive – password protected
  • Producing a conference accommodation and travel guide for on the conference website
  • Publicizing the conference through social media and mailing lists
  • Fully responsible for organising, managing, and scheduling the conference sessions, plenaries, keynotes and associated activities, this includes management of the submission of abstracts, the review process, scheduling the abstracts in conference sessions, and drafting the final programme
  • Creating the conference pack containing a programme booklet including abstracts, delegate list, timetable etc. Organising the conference dinner.
  • Administering conference registration and payment preferably through electronic means, and collecting SSN membership subscriptions via the same mechanism
  • All preconference administration and communication including answering delegate’s queries and sending out emails to the delegates with info about the conference and communication with the keynotes with regards to scheduling, travel and accommodation.
  • Management of front desk and onsite logistics throughout the conference.

Cfp: SSN Small Research Grants (2022-23)

Call for Proposals: SSN Small Research Grants (2022-23)

We are pleased to announce the 2022-23 Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) Small Research Grant competition. The SSN Small Grants scheme provides funding to support junior/early-career scholars working in economically under-resourced regions of the world. This year, we will be able to fund two awards of up to £1500 each, to be used during the 2022-2023 academic year in support of surveillance studies research (for more information about what constitutes surveillance studies research, we recommend reviewing articles published in Surveillance & Society (http://surveillance-and-society.org/), the SSN’s international journal of surveillance studies). These awards will also be accompanied by a two-year SSN membership. The Small Grants Committee will review and select recipients based on the following criteria and process.

Eligibility

Surveillance Studies Network members (or non-members who conduct surveillance-related research and would like to become part of SSN) are encouraged to apply, with preference given to persons who:

  • justify themselves as working in an economically under-resourced region;
  • are early career researchers (i.e., a doctoral student or researcher who has earned their PhD in the last five years);
  • have not previously received funding through the SSN Small Research Grant; and,
  • submit all required materials prior to the application deadline.

Evaluation Criteria

We will be evaluating applications based on their articulation of specific research-related activities that would significantly augment the applicant’s program of research, but that would not be feasible without additional funding. Additionally, we will take into consideration the overall feasibility of the proposed work and the extent to which it is likely to make a significant contribution to surveillance studies

Process

Please submit a brief proposal (approximately 1 page, single spaced) outlining:

  • the activities to be conducted with the funding,
  • the importance of these activities to your program of research,
  • justification of your region of residence as economically under-resourced,
  • description of your suitability for the award based on the other criteria of preference, and
  • a timeline for completion of the activities planned. (All awarded funds must be spent by September 30, 2023).

Additionally, please submit a budget (1-page maximum) outlining your plans for using any awarded funds up to a maximum of £1500 (e.g., transcription services, informant/human-subjects payments, travel costs to conduct field research, technical equipment, conference fees, etc.).

Send your proposal and budget as one document (PDF preferred) to Pinelopi Troullinou at pinelopi.troullinou@trilateralresearch.com on or before September 01, 2022. Please include the following text in your email subject header: “SSN Small Grants Application.” Notification of awards will be made as soon as possible after the deadline.

Post-Award Expectations

Successful applicants will be asked to submit a post-award report outlining the research they conducted using the funds and noting how the SSN Small Grant contributed to the success and implementation of their research. These reports will be due on April 1 in the year following the award. Additionally, applicants may be invited to publish a “Research Note” on our blog Blink (https://medium.com/surveillance-and-society) or in a future issue of Surveillance & Society (for more information about this form of contribution to the journal, see the journal’s submission page at https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/about/submissions). 


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Surveillance & Society

The peer reviewed journal of the SSN

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