[Air-L] Call for Submission 4S 2019 Open Panel: STS, Knowledge Production, Policing and Criminal Justice

[Fieke Jansen]

Dear colleagues,

Just before the holidays, I wanted to share our call for submissions to
the 4S open panel 153

“STS And Computational Knowledge Production In Policing And Criminal
Justice”

Recent innovations in technologies and processes of data analysis and
computational science – mainly in reference to terms (and myths) like
big data, algorithmic decision making and artificial intelligence – have
transformed many processes of knowledge production in the fields of
policing and criminal justice. With predictive policing as one of its
earliest and most prominent representatives (Perry et al. 2013; Bennett
Moses & Chan, 2018), the algorithmic mediated production of
(prospective) knowledge has now also affected the criminal justice
system at every level. Different predictive models include generating
risky spaces – PredPol (Mohler et al., 2015); risky individuals –
Chicago’s ‘strategic subject list’ (Saunders/Hunt/Hollywood, 2016) and
US’ Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System; or calculating the
recidivism risk of convicted offenders in order to inform the sentence
decision (predictive prosecution) (Ferguson, 2016). This development has
gone hand-in-hand with a rapid technological expansion from the
frontline to the back office. Thus, regardless of whether suspects or
spaces are objects of (predictive) knowledge production, or if
recidivism risk scores for convicted offenders are generated, in the
end, policing and justice are increasingly characterized by
socio-technical interwovenness with digital data production and
algorithmic technologies. This calls for a thorough STS analysis to get
at the innovations, interruptions, regenerations, successes and failures
herein involved in the co-construction of policing practices and
technological development. Correspondingly, this panel seeks to ask how
STS can provide analytical tools for grasping the entanglement of
technology and society involved in the development and implementation of
computational knowledge production in policing and criminal justice.

Deadline: February 1, 2019

Submissions: https://www.4s2019.org/accepted-open-panels/



We are looking forward to your proposals!

Thomas Linder, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

Nikolaus Pöchhacker, MCTS, Technical University of Munich

Simon Egbert, University of Hamburg

Fieke Jansen, Cardiff University

Jens Hälterlein, University of Freiburg