Surveillance & Society Conferences

Conference News and Calls

1. 3rd Surveillance & Society Conference

2. The Everyday Life of Surveillance

3. Global Governance of Infectious Disease

3rd Surveillance & Society Conference, 2008

InVisibilities
The Politics, Practice and Experience of Surveillance in Everyday Life

A two-day international conference hosted by
the Centre for Criminological Research, University of Sheffield
in association with the Surveillance Studies Network

Wednesday 2nd April - Thursday 3rd April 2008

While many of the world’s nations are becoming surveillance societies, the nature of life with surveillance in those societies is far from homogeneous, and is not widely researched or theorised. This conference focuses on the lived realities of surveillance and is keen to encourage empirical studies which document its everyday experience.

By its very nature surveillance makes populations visible, and differentiates between their members; surveillance itself features varied techniques, intensities and foci. Whether as workers, consumers, children, patients, criminals, web surfers or travellers we are made visible in different ways, through different technologies and administrative regimes. Visibility is not always total, unproductive or oppressive – visibility is necessarily partial. For some it is actively embraced: lives are lived in visibility.

Nevertheless, widespread ambivalence towards surveillance has been noted in academic, policy and media circles. As surveillance confers benefits and incurs costs on individuals, personal information economies of surveillance emerge. In building personal strategies which involve surveillance practices, invisibilities are negotiated to mediate, limit and exploit exposure to surveillance. How individuals, groups, organizations and societies negotiate, experience, resist, comply with, and enjoy surveillance are critical empirical questions, which appeal to surveillance scholars from a wide range of social science disciplines.

Keynote Speakers:

Zygmunt Bauman

David Lyon

John McGrath

Key themes:

Experiencing Surveillance and Visibility

Participatory and Voluntary Surveillance

Theorising (in)visibility

Histories of Surveillance and Visibility

Surveillance of the Other - Visibility and Difference

Representations of Surveillance in Film/Art/Literature/Media

State Surveillance and Identification

Surveillance and consumer visibility

The transparent body

Researching (in)visibility

Spatial visibilities

Surveillance futures

The conference is also truly international with provisional offers of over 70 papers from fourteen countries including speakers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, UK and the USA. Speakers include:

Krisel Backman, University of Gotenburg, Sweden

Catrina Frois, University of Libson, Portugal

Kevin Haggerty, University of Alberta, Canada

Hille Koskela, University of Helsinki, Finland

Deirdre Mulligan, UC Berkeley, USA

Mike Nellis, Strathclyde University, UK

Minas Samatas, University of Crete, Greece

Chris Williams, Open University, UK

Conference Accommodation

Please find below information about booking your accommodation for the Invisibilities Conference in Sheffield. Please note booking accommodation is the responsibility of the delegate, and we would advise that you do this as soon as possible.

You can either:

1) Use the Sheffield Tourism booking form, which can be found at:
https://www.conferencebookings.co.uk/delegate/YSTINVISIBILITIES08

2) Or you may prefer to book your hotel independently by contacting hotels directly. A list of hotels can be found here:
http://www.sheffield.gov.uk/out--about/tourist-information/staying-in-sheffield

3) There is also University accommodation available at a cost of £40.00 for en-suite and £30.00 for shared facilities. Please note that the en-suite facilities are limited and cannot be guaranteed and will be allocated on a first come first served basis. If you wish to take up the University accommodation option, it is imperative that you e-mail Lisa Burns at as a matter of urgency as numbers are limited.
Conference Organisation
The list of speakers will be available on the conference web page from 4th February
www.sheffield.ac.uk/ccr

The Conference Fee is £200 per person, which includes refreshments and lunch and an optional two years' membership of Surveillance Studies Network. The membership fee will be used to promote the charitable activities of the Surveillance Studies Network, support the continued publication of the Journal of Surveillance and Society and give other benefits to members

The fee will include refreshments and lunch, but not overnight accommodation or evening meals. There will be a conference dinner on April 2nd at an additional charge of £50.

How to Book

If you would like a booking form please email Lisa Burns

You can also down load the conference registration forms at: (from Feb 4th)
www.sheffield.ac.uk/ccr

Returning them by email to: Lisa Burns as soon as possible and no later than March 6th 2008

Or by post to:

Lisa Burns
Research Support Officer
Centre for Criminological Research
Sheffield University, School of Law
Bartolome House
University Of Sheffield
Sheffield
S3 7ND

We look forward to seeing you at the conference!

Professor Clive Norris,

On behalf of the Organising Committee.

The Everyday Life of Surveillance

The Surveillance Studies Network has just won an UK ESRC Seminar Series award for a series of 6 seminars to be held in the UK called 'The Everyday Life of Surveillance' to be held from January 2008 to May 2009. Check here for details!

Global Governance of Infectious Disease:

Risk Surveillance and Regulation

Symposium 10-11 September 2008
Newcastle University, UK

Expressions of interest for participation are invited by 31st January, 2008. Please send:

name

affiliation

suggested title of paper / area of interest

to: Andrew Donaldson and David Murakami Wood.

The entanglement of infectious diseases (of both humans and animals) with the material networks of the globalizing is a matter of increasing concern. Foot and Mouth Disease has shown that an animal disease can cause major disruption to the normal social and economic workings of a modern state. SARS showed the speed with which deadly disease could transcend national borders in a connected world. The threat of a new global flu pandemic, and the linking of this to avian influenza, has demonstrated that the boundaries that might be transgressed are more than just territorial. How should we understand, control or avoid the mobilities of such diseases on a global scale?

This symposium is targeted mainly at human geographers and social scientists in cognate areas of sociology, science studies, public health and politics. We will have participants from relevant policy or regulatory bodies, but aim to sketch a strategic and critical social science agenda that is not driven by immediate policy / applied concerns but which nevertheless can contribute to improved wellbeing.

The cost of the event will be no more than: £150 for full-time, £100 for postgraduates. This will be a non-residential event, so you will need to find your own accommodation (a full list of options will be provided).

There will be three sequential sessions focusing on three types of site at which diseases are constructed as issues, problems and objects of knowledge in different ways, but with the themes of regulation, risk and surveillance running through all three. A central point of the symposium is to identify the things 'in-between' the various domains involved in disease, including those things which bridge the nonhuman/human divide.

Farmyard, Clinic and Lab
This session will focus on the activities which occur at sites of direct interaction between disease and healthcare professionals, and the ways in local interactions connect with other scales. Comparison between human and animal medicine could provide useful insights in this area. Possible topics will include:

Diagnosis and disease surveillance

Local knowledges

Organisation and knowledge exchange

Models
This session will focus on the way in which diseases are represented, simulated, predicted and anticipated through the use of statistical analysis, computer modelling, mapping and more basic field surveillance techniques. Increasingly advanced modelling techniques are at the heart of disease prevention and control, but in the words of statistician George Box “All models are wrong” so we need to put them into context. Possible topics will include:

Fieldwork vs models

Data collection and coordination

Communication and controversy

Institutions and Circulations
This session will focus on the interaction of diseases and their representations with global political and economic structures, organizations and processes. The maintenance and dismantling of borders and bounded territories in the face of multiple flows and mobilities is a concern in many areas of strategic planning, policy making and regulation. When considering infectious diseases the following are possible topics:

Transnational organizations

Trade and (making and unmaking) boundaries

Measures for global surveillance and intervention

Travel, consumption and risk

Organising Committee:
Andrew Donaldson, CRE, Newcastle
David Murakami Wood, GURU, Newcastle
Valerie November, EPFL, Switzerland
Abigail Woods, Imperial College, London