[Air-L] 4S Open Panel: The Problem with Privacy

[Samuel DiBella]

Dear colleagues, We invite any submissions to our open panel at 4S 2025, 
September 3-7, 2025, Seattle WA: /Open panel /The Problem with Privacy 
/Abstract/ Within the United States, privacy remains a contested and 
polysemous term. To some, privacy is an amorphous social good; to 
others, it is a threatened right that must be preserved against 
intrusion by information technology; to still others, privacy is 
out-dated or incoherent, an inadequate heuristic for present and future 
socio-technical realities. Whether privacy should be revitalized or 
discarded, the concept still holds together a set of affective 
attachments — we can analyze how instances of ‘privacy’ signify 
admixtures of belief around the adequacy of U.S. judicial law, the 
promise of certain tech-led futures, one’s trust in more proximate 
public and private data actors, and so on. Within the academy, the 
concept generally iterates heuristics that test novel socio-technical 
conduct against (more or less conservative) articulations of liberal 
democratic theory (Nissenbaum 2004, Cohen 2013). In contrast, other work 
describes the extensive privacy preservation behaviors that individuals 
or communities practice to protect themselves or how privacy has 
socially changed over time (Nippert-Eng 2010, Marwick 2023, Igo 2018). 
In short, ‘privacy’ indexes live tensions — how is the concept made 
useful, and for who? How do debates around privacy link with broader 
contestations of technologicalized futures? What relations do privacy 
practices enact between individuals, communities, tech firms, and the 
state? This panel invites submissions from scholars who approach privacy 
through this lens of contestation. We are especially interested in 
community-engaged research that reflects on the uses (and limitations) 
of privacy, at a time when the tenets of liberal democracy are 
increasingly difficult to locate within technology governance. We 
welcome panelists across a range of fields, such as: urban surveillance 
and policing, social media and online platforms, healthcare and patient 
populations, labor. Conveners: Samuel DiBella, Lian Song Abstract 
submission deadline: January 31, 2025 To submit, please go to the 4S 
submission page 
<https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php> and select 
panel #56. Best wishes, —Sam