[Air-l] last cfp: Smart Borders and Mobilities

[Stephen Marmura]

Surveillance and Society

Issue 5 (2/3): Smart Borders and Mobilities: Spaces, Zones, Enclosures

Edited by: Louise Amoore, Stephen Marmura, and Mark Salter

Publication date: September 2007

Deadline for submissions: 1st March 2007



Call for Papers

The border has been called the fundamental political institution, 
delineating between inside/outside, us/them, safe/dangerous, known/unknown. 
With the increased ability of state and commercial agents to overcome and 
reinvent traditional sovereign lines, borders are instantiated throughout 
society not simply at border posts but also at airports, in databases, 
through international call centers, and with identity documents. 
Cross-border data-flows may complicate realities already identified as 
problematic within information-based societies. Surveillance practices in 
public spaces, border zones, and the workplace may become both more nuanced 
and more intrusive, as we see with anti-globalization protests, Schengen 
border zones, and in low-wage non-unionized labour shops. The tracking and 
identification of specific individuals or groups by government agencies may 
be intensified. Consumers may be increasingly subjected to 'foreign' 
marketing and advertising strategies not legally sanctioned within their 
own societies. Citizens may have data transmitted and analyzed far from the 
point of origin or of collection in the cases of passenger profiling or the 
more general war on terror. Wider and wider risk groups are being 
surveilled in ways that circumvent or restructure borders.


Surveillance and Society is seeking papers that examine how borders produce 
or reinforce spaces, zones, or enclosures and the processes, structures, 
and institutions of control that exceed the border. The editors are 
interested in how the mobility of data itself is transforming, what kinds 
of boundaries and exceptions this produces, how this rearticulates 
relationships between science, law and the political, and how the border is 
realized via data. We are seeking both theoretical and empirical articles 
which illuminate this set of issues. In addition to sociology, the subject 
of borders and surveillance holds relevance for a wide range of academic 
disciplines including geography, law, cultural anthropology, philosophy, 
and political science.  We encourage contributions which draw attention to 
geo-demographic, legal, cultural, ethical, technological, political and/or 
social-economic aspects of data-flows.



Possible topics of interest include:

Implications for privacy in cross-border data-flows;

Effect of RFID or biometric technologies on both identity documents and 
border policing;

Dataveillance of financial transactions by both commercial enterprises and 
governments;

Strategies of risk displacement and risk management through 
knowledge-industries;

International surveillance of marginal or "dangerous" populations;

International comparative studies of state approaches to the governance of 
cross-border data;

Comparisons between corporate vs. state influence over data-flows;

Divergences in relevant public attitudes towards privacy and personal data 
flows in different countries;

Parallels and anomalies concerning data-flows and international flows of 
goods, currency and persons.


Submissions should be sent electronically to Emily Smith at 
<mailto:smithea at post.queensu.ca>smithea at post.queensu.ca by March 1st 2007 
with a publication date of September 2007.

We welcome full academic papers, opinion pieces, review pieces, poetry, 
artistic, and audio-visual submissions.  Please see 
<http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/>www.surveillance-and-society.org 
for further submission guidelines.