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

[Gary Kafer]

Dear colleagues,

For a special section of a forthcoming issue of *Jump Cut
<https://www.ejumpcut.org/home.html>*, we invite submissions for articles
and review essays on the topic of "Global Perspectives on Surveillance."

The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2023.
Please circulate widely!

---

*Global Perspectives on Surveillance*
Call for Papers

Special Section of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media

Full Paper Submission Deadline: January 15, 2023

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 2014 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 vast social credit system and
internment camps.

And yet, even as such 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
sold on the global market, such as in Israel’s occupation of Palestine
(Halper 2015) or the repression of indigenous communities at the borders of
settler states (Schaeffer 2022).

Building on such debates in surveillance studies, this special section of
Jump Cut explores how the global remains a fraught, if not necessary,
framework to grapple with how surveillance is inextricable from racial
violence, capital accumulation, and settler colonial rule. In particular,
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 technologies – whether data-based
or otherwise – are used, viewed, and resisted in particular geographic
contexts. To sure, scholars of these fields have already taken stock of the
global formations of infrastructure and labor through which surveillance is
made possible, such as in the case of transpacific fiber-optic cable
systems (Starosielski 2015), lithium mining (Crawford 2021), and outsourced
content moderation (Gray and Suri 2019). They have also examined the
emergent visual regimes of global surveillance within satellites (Parks
2018) and drones (Shaw 2016), as well as have interrogated the
transnational politics of logistical systems (Hockenberry, Starosielski,
and Zieger 2021). At the same time, many others have considered how
entertainment media produce public imaginaries in the Global North about
the exercise of surveillance elsewhere, such as in televisual and filmic
depictions of border security (Fojas 2021) and video games about war and
counterterrorism (Payne 2016). Finally, many activist communities are
actively developing media counter-practices for resisting digital state
surveillance within sites of social unrest and rebellion around the world
(Choudry 2019).

For this special section of Jump Cut, we invite contributions that examine
how surveillance is a global process located within specific cultural,
political, and social practices of power. Such research might address (but
is not limited to) the following topics:
• 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
• Networked global cities
• Social media in the Global South
• Algorithms and discrimination
• Public policy and regulation of surveillance
• Transnational security regimes

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 2015”). Please submit your document in a MS Word-compatible format.

Timeline
Submissions should be emailed to gkafer at uchicago.edu by January 15, 2023.
Please put “JC – Global Surveillance” in the subject line.

Decisions will be communicated by the end of March 2023.

Final revisions will be due May 1, 2023.

The special section will be published in a forthcoming issue of Jump Cut in
the winter of 2023.



-- 
Gary Kafer
PhD Candidate, Dept. of Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
gkafer at uchicago.edu