At the SSN 2022 conference the winners of the arts prizes from 2020 and 2022 were awarded and honoured. The presented their works and engaged in a discussion with the audience on their works and the subject of arts within surveillance studies and further afield.
The curators Julia Chab and Stéfy McKnight moderated the panel and guided through the ceremony.
Congratulations to all winners and the honorable mentions.
More on the prizes, artists and their works here: https://www.ssnartsprize.com
Dear Colleagues,
we invite expressions of interest to write short (2000-word) papers for an upcoming Dialogue section of Surveillance & Society focused on the topic of “Surveillance in Contemporary Conflict.” We aim to publish the section in the March 2023 issue of Surveillance & Society.
In this Dialogue, we seek contributions that examine how surveillance is part of, and has grown out of, contemporary conflicts around the world. The war in Ukraine is certainly within the scope of this call, however we are also interested in pieces that examine how, by comparison, surveillance in non-Western conflicts remains largely unnoticed and undebated. We also seek proposals for contributions that engage thoughtfully with questions of how race, privilege, and discrimination inflect contemporary conflicts or assessments of them. As usual, the focus of proposed submissions should be on surveillance (practices, technologies, ethics, etc.) itself, situated within the contexts of conflict(s) around the world. Additionally, we are open to contributions that explore ideas, theories, or methods with which to approach issues of conflict in future surveillance-studies scholarship.
Possible topics could include technologies of war; low-tech innovations; the role of social media or communication channels; or geo-political tensions. Possible regional foci could include the ongoing wars and conflicts in Yemen; Afghanistan; Palestine; Myanmar; Ethiopia; Eritrea; Paraguay; Syria; Sudan; Nigeria; or, Iraq.
We are hoping to curate a small set of papers from scholars in various parts of the world, including in the Global South and areas not as commonly the focus of surveillance studies research. As such, we will prioritize submissions against those criteria, in addition to excellence and fit with the full set of accepted papers.
If you are interested in proposing a short paper for inclusion in this discussion, please send the following to Keith Spiller (Associate Editor) and Bryce Newell (Dialogue Editor) on or before the end of day on July 1, 2022 (Keith.Spiller@bcu.ac.uk and bcnewell@uoregon.edu):
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Surveillance Studies Network’s 2021 “Early Career Researcher Awards” for publications in Surveillance & Society. Congratulations to Audrey Amsellem, Matthew Archer, and Jade Hinchliffe. If you haven’t already read their pieces, follow the links to do so.
Amsellem, Audrey. 2021. The Noise of Silent Machines: A Case Study of LinkNYC. Surveillance & Society 19(2): 168-186.
Archer, Matthew. 2021. Imagining Impact in Global Supply Chains: Data-Driven Sustainability and the Production of Surveillable Space. Surveillance & Society 19(3): 282-298.
Hinchliffe, Jade. 2021. Speculative Fiction, Sociology, and Surveillance Studies: Towards a Methodology of the Surveillance Imaginary. Surveillance & Society 19(4): 414-424.
Congratulations to the winners!!!
The selection committee is delighted to announce the winner of the SSN Arts Prize 2022, Elham Fatapour’s homemade satellite dishes (2019-2020).
Additionally, the committee awarded two honourable mention awards to Wendy Wong for Linguistic racism and the sonic surveillance of speech in schools (2021) and Jessica-Maria Nassif for Mix, Match, and Start from Scratch (2019-2021).
We received many impressive applications to the competition this year, and the committee is thankful to all those who took the time to apply. The Surveillance Studies Network Arts Prize is a bi-annual award that recognizes and publicly supports artwork centred on critical readings of surveillance. The award includes a monetary prize, invited participation in a future Surveillance & Society forum discussing the work, and a showcase opportunity at the Surveillance Studies Network’s conference on 01-03 June 2022 at Erasmus University Rotterdam in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Congratulations to the SSN Arts Prize 2022 winner and two honourable mentions!
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 two previous Arts Prizes in 2018 and 2020, the SSN is delighted to announce the call for nominations to the 2022 competition.
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 to be held 01-03 June 2022 at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, as well as coverage in a Surveillance & Society forum discussing the work. Funds permitting, winning artists will also receive an invitation to showcase their work, or a representation of it, in an onsite or virtual exhibition during SSN’s 2022 conference.
Please note that, due to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic, the format of the 2022 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 2019, 2020, or 2021 calendar years. The following criteria will be used to adjudicate the nominations:
The call for nominations closes on 30 November at 11:59pm EST, with the selected artworks announced in January 2022. To nominate an artwork for the upcoming competition, please download and complete the following form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gSbgzAPX-3MM4ufcvY0Yr84BTz9IxHmI/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113188570049587824126&rtpof=true&sd=true. Self-nominations are welcome.
For further information, please contact Susan Cahill, Arts Editor of Surveillance & Society at susan.cahill@ucalgary.ca and include the heading “SSN Arts Prize”.
*Submission forms are hosted by Google. For a PDF version, please send a request to susan.cahill@ucalgary.ca with the heading “SSN Arts Prize form—PDF request”.
9th Biennial Surveillance Studies Network Conference
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1-3 June 2022
More information about the conference and the call for papers will follow in September 2021
Dear Colleagues,
The Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) is beginning its 2021 mentorship program for doctoral students engaged in research topics on surveillance.
One faculty member mentor will be paired with one PhD student mentee for a one-year period beginning in June 2021. The time commitment is minimal, but the program greatly assists young 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 literatures, the academic job market, or other matters relating to 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 Julia Chan (julia.chan@carleton.ca) by June 25. 2021 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!
Julia
The Surveillance Studies Network is pleased to announce the winners of the Surveillance Studies Network’s 2020 “Early Career Researcher Awards” for publications in Surveillance & Society.
Congratulations to the winners!!! Please check out their papers (again)!
Dear Colleagues,
We are very excited to announce a call for contributions to a joint Dialogue Section-Art Forum of Surveillance & Society we are calling “Surveillance Stories: Imagining Surveillance Futures.” Storytelling has the ability to capture the imagination and to attract a wide audience. Stories can also generate important meanings, engage metaphors, and explore new possibilities in ways that conventional academic papers often cannot, or at least typically do not.
Therefore, for this special project, we invite contributions that creatively engage with the possibilities of the surveillant future. Submissions should inform how we ought to think about surveillance, regulate surveillance, or study surveillance to achieve/avoid the futures depicted in the stories. These pieces can take the form of a short narrative piece (~800 to 2000-words, if text-based; ~2-5 minutes if time-based media), including speculative stories. They can also involve artistic interventions that explore and visualize this topic. Contributions can be fictional, quasi-fictional, or nonfiction stories (presented in a narrative fashion) that draw on surveillance studies research and theory to imagine what possible surveillance futures might look like.
Our interest here is to encourage stories that imagine utopian as well as dystopian futures, and that utilize creative text, images, video, and other forms of artistic expression (the range of media for artworks that can be presented is subject to the technological limitations of the journal’s platform, but can include video and limited photography or images—please get in touch if you have questions about what might be possible). For selected pieces, we will also request that authors include a closing paragraph or two at the end of each piece that specifically links the elements of the story to existing surveillance studies research (including research previously published in Surveillance & Society or elsewhere, or that builds on the authors’ own fieldwork or other research). (Media not based in text should also include a transcript of dialogue, basic description of the visuals, etc.)
Along with the narration of surveillant futures as a mode of creative address, our goal with this special project is to make space for explorations that focus on and derive from various regions and perspectives often under-represented in surveillance studies research. We are interested in bringing into conversation a collection of works that capture a range of approaches and from a multitude of viewpoints. As such, we will prioritize submissions against those criteria, in addition to excellence and fit with the full set of accepted pieces.
For inspiration and as examples of similar sorts of projects, we refer you to a new publication from the UW Tech Policy Lab, “Telling Stories” (https://techpolicylab.uw.edu/telling-stories/), that contains fictional stories about artificial intelligence. You may also find Dr. Casey Fiesler’s new paper, “Innovating like an Optimist, Preparing like a Pessimist: Ethical Speculation and the Legal Imagination” of interest (find it online at https://ctlj.colorado.edu/?page_id=1283). Within the Value Sensitive Design field, Nathan, Klasnja, and Friedman’s “Value Scenarios: A Technique for Envisioning Systemic Effects of New Technologies” (https://doi.org/10.1145/1240866.1241046) may also be of interest.
If you are interested in proposing piece for the Surveillance Stories section, please send the following to us on or before the end of day on April 16, 2021 (to both bcnewell@uoregon.edu and susan.cahill@ucalgary.ca):
Authors will be notified of initial acceptance decisions on or before May 15, 2021. Final drafts/versions of provisionally accepted pieces will be due on September 1, 2021. Final acceptance will follow shortly thereafter, with anticipated publication in the December 2021 issue of Surveillance & Society.
Please note that Dialogue and Art pieces are not refereed, but are subject to editorial review and, if (tentatively) accepted, possible requests for revision. Depending on time constraints, we also hope to allow authors of accepted contributions the chance to read or view and engage with the other accepted pieces prior to publication, to create a real dialogue within the section, when possible. We will only be selecting a limited number of pieces for inclusion in this special section. Recent Dialogue sections have focused on Surveillance and the COVID-19 Pandemic (coming in March 2021), Surveillance as Evidence, The State of Sousveillance, and Decolonizing Surveillance Studies.
We look forward to reading your proposals.
Dear Colleagues,
as the Dialogue Editor of Surveillance & Society, I invite expressions of interest to write short (~2000-word) papers for an upcoming Dialogue section of the journal focused on the interrelated topics of “Domestic Terrorism, White Supremacy, and State Surveillance.” We aim to publish the section in either the June or September 2021 issue of Surveillance & Society.
In this Dialogue, we seek contributions that examine how concerns about domestic terrorism, white supremacy, and/or nationalism have impacted domestic state surveillance practices and surveillance powers in countries around the world. The attack on the U.S. Capitol Building in January 2021 represents just one recent and high-profile instance of how nationalism and white supremacy have resulted in calls for greater domestic surveillance practices and powers. There have been others in many parts of the world in recent years. Thus, in this section we call for proposals to submit Dialogue pieces to the journal that reflect on, unpack, or critique how domestic state surveillance powers have been affected by domestic terrorism concerns in countries around the world (especially those related to white supremacy and nationalism), how surveillance studies research might inform the path forward, and (where relevant) how a surveillant focus on white nationalists and domestic terrorism might also negatively impact communities of color, exacerbate inequalities, and/or promote discrimination.
Specifically, we are looking for short contributions that answer (some of) these questions and, in the process, also critically examine the role that such surveillance may play in societies around the globe and suggest ideas, theories, or methods to approach surveillance studies research in the future. We are hoping to curate a small set of papers from scholars in various parts of the world, including in the Global South and areas not as commonly the focus of surveillance studies research. As such, we will prioritize submissions against those criteria, in addition to excellence and fit with the full set of accepted papers.
If you are interested in proposing a short paper for inclusion in this discussion, please send the following to me on or before the end of day on Feb. 28, 2021 (to bcnewell@uoregon.edu):
Please note that Dialogue pieces are not refereed, but are subject to editorial review and, if (tentatively) accepted, possible requests for revision. Depending on time constraints, we also hope to allow authors of accepted papers the chance to read and engage with the other accepted papers prior to publication, to create a real dialogue within the section. We will only be selecting a small number of pieces for inclusion in this special section.
I look forward to reading your proposals.
© 2016 The Surveillance Studies Network
contact: ssn@surveillance-studies.net
