[Air-L] CfP: "Global Perspectives on Surveillance" (Jump Cut)

[Daniela Jaramillo-Dent]

d.jaramillo at ikmz.uzh.ch

On Mon, Sep 11, 2023 at 11:28 PM Gary Kafer via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I write to share a CfP for a special section of *Jump Cut: A Review of
> Contemporary Media* on the topic of "Global Perspectives on Surveillance."
> Deadline Jan 15.
> Please see the call below. We appreciate any help in spreading the word to
> your colleagues.
> Thanks!
>
> ###
>
> *Global Perspectives on Surveillance*
> Call for Papers
>
> *Special Section of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media*
> (editor-in-chief Julia Lesage)
> *Section Editor*: Gary Kafer (University of Chicago)
>
> *Description:*
> This special section of Jump Cut seeks original research and review essays
> that examine the global circuits of surveillance that increasingly mark
> contemporary social and political life.
>
> Towards the end of the twentieth century, surveillance studies scholars
> proclaimed the arrival of a “surveillance society” (Marx 1985; Gandy 1989;
> Lyon 1994), which soon became global by the turn of the century following
> the attacks on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Lyon 2004; Murakami 2009; Ström
> 2020). In many ways indebted to the emergence of novel digital and
> communication tools, such critiques called attention to increasing levels
> of tracking practices by national governments and corporations to preempt
> threats and safeguard capital. No doubt, the global parameters of
> surveillance were put on full display with the Snowden leaks of 2013 as the
> world became cognizant of The Five Eyes intelligence alliance (Australia,
> Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States), which was
> soon followed by media coverage of China’s Digital Silk Road Initiative.
>
> And yet, even as these developments exposed the globality of surveillance
> systems, such frameworks tend to maintain the ‘global’ as simply a
> reference point for the ‘Global North’ and its centers of data accumulation
> and exchange. Such narratives are troublesome, not in the least for the way
> that they ignore how surveillance has historically always been
> transnational in scope, such as in the development of biometrics and
> identification documents in chattel slavery and penal colonies across
> colonial and imperial regimes (Browne 2015; Heynen and van der Meulen
> 2019). At the same time, some global frameworks ignore how many
> surveillance devices are first developed and tested in sites of settler
> colonial and capitalist violence—often in the Global South—before being
> distributed by international defense industries for use elsewhere, such as
> in Israel’s occupation of Palestine (Halper 2015) or the repression of
> indigenous communities at the borders of settler states (Schaeffer 2022).
>
> Following suit, this special section of Jump Cut explores how the global
> remains a fraught, if not necessary, framework to grapple with the
> contemporary politics of surveillance. We invite research that approaches
> such issues from the fields of media studies, film studies, visual studies,
> communication studies, and related disciplines to consider how surveillance
> is a global process located within historically situated cultural,
> political, and social practices. Such research can address concerns in the
> twenty-first century as well as longer histories of surveillance. Potential
> topics include (but are not limited to):
> • Technologies of border security
> • Biometrics – past, present, future
> • Internet infrastructures
> • Ecologies of resource extraction
> • Platforms and outsourced labor
> • Militarization of police
> • Counter-practices to surveillance
> • Global surveillance and documentary aesthetics
> • Representations of global surveillance in entertainment media
> • Social media in the Global South
> • Algorithms and discrimination
>
> *Submission Information:*
> We welcome a range of submissions including article length essays, short
> reflection papers, opinion pieces, book reviews, and film reviews.
>
> Submissions will undergo a peer-review and revision process prior to
> publication. Submissions should be original work, neither previously
> published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All references
> to previous work by contributors should be masked in the text (e.g.,
> “Author 2020”). Please submit your document in a MS Word-compatible format.
>
> *Timeline*
> Submissions should be emailed to gkafer at uchicago.edu by January 15, 2024.
> Please put “JC – Global Surveillance” in the subject line.
>
> Decisions will be communicated by the end of March 2024.
>
> Final revisions will be due June 1, 2024.
>
> The special section will be published in a forthcoming issue of Jump Cut in
> the winter of 2024.
>
> *References:*
> Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.
> Durham: Duke University Press.
> Gandy, Oscar. 1989. “The Surveillance Society: Information Technology and
> Bureaucratic Social Control.” Journal of Communication 39: 61–76.
> Halper, Jeff. 2015. War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and
> Global Pacification. London: Pluto Press.
> Heynen, Robert, and Emily van der Meulen (eds.). 2019. Making Surveillance
> States: Transnational Histories. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
> Lyon, David. 1994. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance
> Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
> Lyon, David. 2004. “Globalizing Surveillance.” International Sociology 19:
> 135–49.
> Marx, Gary. 1985. “The Surveillance Society: The Threat of 1984-style
> Techniques.” The Futurist 6: 21–6.
> Murakami Wood, David. 2009. “The ‘Surveillance Society’: Questions of
> History, Place and Culture.” European Journal of Criminology 6(2): 179-194.
> Schaeffer, Felicity Amaya. 2022. Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science
> of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land. Durham: Duke University Press.
> Ström, Timothy Erik. 2020. Globalizing Surveillance. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
> Littlefield Publishers.
>
> --
> Gary Kafer
> Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow
> Department of Cinema and Media Studies
> University of Chicago
> gkafer at uchicago.edu
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>