- CALL FOR PAPERS -
Dear all,
Please consider joining our panel PORTABLE PANOPTICONS: (IN)VISIBILITY, INTIMACY AND EXPOSURE IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS at the VIENNA ANTHROPOLOGY DAYS (VANDA), 19th-22nd September 2018.
Abstracts (max. 4000 characters) should be submitted no later than June 15th, 2018 via the conference website: https://vanda.univie.ac.at/call-for-papers/
Session conveners: Roger Casas (Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences) & Hannah Klepeis (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale)
Panel abstract:
Mercilessly dissolving dreams and promises of freedom through universal access to information, technological advances including biometrics, digital recognition (and the concurrent spread of CCTV cameras), data management, and the ubiquity of mobile connectivity, are making Foucauldian dystopias of total visibility very real. While new technologies are facilitating the acquisition and management of personal data on the part of states and corporations, providing these institutions with unprecedented power to assess and direct individual political and market choices, a defining feature of these processes is the democratization of surveillance – the transfer of responsibility for the policing of behaviour from political and economic institutions, to individual consumers themselves.
At the same time new technologies provide fresh opportunities for the anonymous self-fashioning of identities and the development of virtual ‘communities of complicity’ (Steinmüller 2014). The present ubiquity of social networks and apps capable of recording and storing video and audio files in portable communication devices threatens us with the spilling over of the private into the public sphere, in the form of compromising images, sounds and written words. This risk of exposure of individual and group ‘cultural intimacies’ (Herzfeld 1996) has provoked an unprecedented crisis of visibility concerning spaces previously sealed off from the public (student dorms, monastic cells, military barracks, karaoke rooms, etc.), defined in turn by a rising awareness of the self and self-presentation, and an ever-present policing of political and moral personae.
This panel calls for contributions aiming at exploring this rapidly evolving landscape, defined by the ambiguous and fluid dynamics between the offline and the online, the public and the private, the visible and the invisible. We would like to look at the ways in which refined instruments of (self-)control and the general expectation to be not only connected and available, but visible at all times, are forcing unwitting individuals around the world (including anthropologists themselves) to participate in the endlessly creative patrolling, evaluating, and regulating of behaviour and discourse, in the process supporting a de-politicization of (public) morality through the immediate consumption of intimacies.
Do not hesitate to contact us for further questions: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
We are looking forward to receiving your contributions.
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