[Air-L] Surveillant Antiquities and Modern Transparencies: Exercising and Resisting Surveillance Then and Now

[Seda Gurses]

Dear Airudites,

It is my pleasure to announce our upcoming workshop that intends to put surveillance in a greater historical context while also interrogating its various incarnations in religious and more secular contexts. 
Happy weekend!
Seda and Tudor Sala


Surveillant Antiquities and Modern Transparencies: Exercising and Resisting Surveillance Then and Now
19th October, 2015
Berlin, Germany


Intelligent drones, microscopic tracking devices, brain scanners: seemingly unlimited technological possibilities make surveillance appear a thing of the future. Edward Snowden’s recent disclosures and bleak predictions about comprehensive spying in an age of electronic communication only increased public anxieties about surveillance in the now and in the tomorrow. Yet centuries, if not millennia, before the surveillance apocalypse of the twenty-first century, various models of social and individual transparency were evident in writings and architecture from ancient Mesopotamia to early medieval China and from classical India to the late antique Mediterranean world. Total surveillance—whether as ideal or nightmare, whether as theory or practice, whether as tradition or innovation—is by no means a contrivance of the present or the near future, but rather a construction of the distant past.

The workshop will shed light on the complex practices, strategies, and imaginaires of total surveillance, both familiar and less well known, in the ancient and late ancient worlds. We will explore ancient forms of information mediation and centralization, the employment of record keeping and accounting, technologies of self-discipline, and the strategic use of architecture and the organization of space, while drawing also on notions of all-seeing gods and demonic beings and of sin and pollution, as well as on practices of purification or expiation, divination, ordeals, and omens. Using this historical knowledge, the workshop intends to turn the gaze back upon the present-day surveillance complex, discerning in the lofty and imperturbable lenses that surround us reflections of age-old struggles, resistances, and failures.


19.10.2015
09:00 - 09:20	Introductions
			Seda Gürses – Princeton University, New Jersey, USA
			Tudor Sala – Institut für Religionswissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin

09:20 - 09:50	Walls, Lists, and Policemen: How Efficient was the Control of the Royal Necropolis during the New Kingdom (1550–1050 BC)?
			Andreas Dorn – Ägyptisches Museum, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

09:50 - 10:20	Ideology and Practice of Surveillance in Ancient China: The Establishment of the Imperial Secretariat in Imperial China
			Dennis Schilling – Institut für Sinologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

10:20 - 10:50	Looking Right: Community Surveillance, Women, Sex, and Social Control in Ancient Rome
			Rebecca Langlands – Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

10:50 - 11:15 	Coffee Break

11:15 - 11:45	Monastic Discernment and Divine Judgment: Dynamics of Surveillance behind the Apocalypse of Paul
			Emiliano Fiori – Lehrstuhl für Ältere Kirchengeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
11:45 - 12:15	Surveilled Women: Female Crime and Female Confinement in Late Antiquity
			Julia Hillner – Department of History, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

12:15 - 12:45	The Intimate Surveillance of Calvinists in Reformation France
			Graeme Murdock – Department of History, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

12:45 - 14:00	Lunch Break

14:00 - 14:45	Surveillance in the Formative Period of Islam: A Comparative Intellectual Historical Exploration
			Mohammad Mahdi Mojahedi – Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin

14:45 - 15:15	The Industrialization of Surveillance and the Limits of Community and Social Interaction Theories
			Jörg Pohle – Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft

15:15 - 15:45	The Rise of Preemptive Surveillance of Children in England and Wales: Social and Ethical Consequences
			Rosamunde Van Brakel – Law, Science, Technology & Society Studies , Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

15:45 - 16:15	Coffee Break

16:15 - 17:15	Scientia potestas est: A Knowledge-Centric Analysis of (and Apologia for?) State Surveillance in the Early Roman Empire
			Keynote Address
			Christopher Fuhrmann – Department of History, University of North Texas, USA

17:15 - 18:00	Round Table

19:00 - 20:30	Dinner

For further information please visit
http://www.topoi.org/event/31612/