Call for papers

Association of American Geographers 2009 Annual Meeting
March 22-27, 2009
Las Vegas

Spaces of Surveillance: Power and Control in the Information Age

Surveillance – in its various forms – has become a critical issue in  
many academic fields, including geography. Surveillance theories  
emphasize the everydayness of increasingly powerful, yet discreet  
forms of surveillance that are responding not only to security issues  
but also to various commercial and political rationales. ‘Spaces of  
surveillance’, thus, relate to a large variety of places and  
phenomena: from policing and border control to state administration,  
health care, consumption management and work monitoring. Surveillance  
also works at all spatial scales. It has become intrinsically woven  
into the texture of everyday life, it is embedded in urban  
infrastructures, and it works through global communication networks  
and control techniques of international mobilities. The  
representations of surveillance circle around in movies, literature  
and other popular culture.

The information society is an increasingly surveillant society. Yet,  
it is evident that the authorities can no longer control how and where  
surveillance is used. Surveillance technology is used in ever smaller  
units and its distribution has become ever freer. The proliferation of  
information and communication technologies has created new equipment  
(accessible home surveillance devices, webcams and mobile phones with  
cameras) new arenas (global communities on the Internet) and new types  
of social relations and moralities. Hence, the internalisation of  
discipline and control is accompanied by creative empowering ways of  
being ‘un-disciplined’. People are participating in the production of  
surveillance in their everyday lives. While everybody has turned into  
a potential observer, the distinction between critical overseers and  
amateur paparazzis has remained vague. People are both targets of  
disciplinary control and active agents in counter surveillance.

The proposed session seeks to bring together senior and junior  
scholars giving presentations which contribute to the discussion of  
the various spaces, forms, reasons and effects of surveillance. How is  
surveillance experienced in everyday life? How do rapid technological  
developments change the field of surveillance? What processes and  
mechanisms sustain the current proliferation and trivialisation of  
surveillance? What forms do the political geographies of surveillance  
take? How is surveillance appropriating, gendering and racializing  
space? How do post-Foucauldian forms of power and discipline work?  
What are the contemporary forms of counter surveillance?

Session organizers:
Dr. Hille Koskela, Department of Social Policy, University of  
Helsinki, Finland, [log in to unmask]
Dr. Francisco R. Klauser, Institute of Hazard and Risk Research,  
Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK,  
[log in to unmask]

Please send a brief abstract (not more than 250 words), accompanied by  
a short biography of the author(s) to either of the organizers by  
October 15th 2008.


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