With a keynote address by Meredith Whittaker,
president of Signal and chief advisor to the AI now institute
The world is facing an unprecedented combination of crises: a widening gulf of inequality and contradictions in the capitalist economic system, the intensification of new and existing forms of social injustice, mass mobility and migration on a scale unseen in the past, renewed authoritarianism and multiple attacks on human rights and even the concept of a shared humanity, digital disruption of politics and social relations, psychic and material insecurity, the destruction of our local and global environments, and the potentially catastrophic alteration of the climate which allows life to flourish on this planet. We are entering an age of crisis. But we are also witnessing and enabling a new world struggling to be born.
Surveillance has always had an intimate relationship with crisis and transformation. Surveillance appears, spreads and intensifies as a response and an ‘answer’ to crises. Crises sharpen and focus ordinary problems, practices and technologies of government and social ordering. Crises have shaped the way in which surveillance is understood, developed and implemented at all levels. And finally, surveillance has also helped to shape the very construction, perception and understanding of crises.
SSN 2024 asks us all to face this age of crisis, and confront the multiple intersections of surveillance in and around it. We call for proposals for papers, panels, doctoral colloquium participation, and other interventions on all aspects of surveillance in these times of crisis.
The Conference will take place over 3 full days from 29-31 May, 2024, at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. All in-person sessions will be streamed online, and there will also be a dedicated online track with remote presentations for presenters who cannot attend in-person.
There will also be an associated in-person colloquium for doctoral students on the afternoon before the conference, 28 May. Interested doctoral colloquium participants should indicate their interest in attending the colloquium via the regular conference proposal submission portal.
Type
Examples
Please note that SSN2024 is primarily an in-person conference. We are offering online-only and hybrid sessions for presenters from the Majority World and those with visa or health issues. We are a small educational charity, and this conference is run on a very tight budget by volunteers, and we have made our financial and organizational plans on the basis of what the authors specified in the abstract submission stage. If you do not fall into the categories for online presentation, you have had a paper accepted, and have not previously requested an online option, we would generally expect you either to be present or to pay the full in-person fees.
The 9th biennial Surveillance & Society conference was hosted by Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Our first workshop between biennial conferences and our first official event in North America
The Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) is a registered charitable company dedicated to the study of surveillance in all its forms, and the free distribution of scholarly information.