Call for Papers for ISA (International Sociological Association) RC21 conference, Antwerp, 6-8 July 2020

 

Session title: Policing the City: Assembling Communities and Crowdsourced Data

Session number: 80

 

Session organizers:

dr. Ana Ivasiuc, Philipps University Marburg         

dr. Lior Volinz, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

 

In the last decade, there has been a crucial shift in urban policing. On one hand, data crowdsourcing initiatives encouraged by traditional state security actors themselves have proliferated through what has been called ‘lateral’ or ‘participatory’ surveillance. On the other hand, observers have noted the bottom-up emergence of informal policing as a reaction to the perceived inability or unwillingness of the state to control urban crime. Urban citizens and the state are entangled in such dynamics in complex ways that afford theoretical reflection on issues of statecraft, as well as on transformations of urban policing and of the urban space itself. Around state-encouraged initiatives of informal policing, this shift entails the establishment of new platforms and interfaces to facilitate the relations between security actors (such as the police, local authorities and migration enforcement agencies) and urban residents. The self-organized neighbourhood patrols are more often than not met with reluctance by state authorities who see their monopoly of crime control being challenged; one of the state responses to such initiatives has been the promotion of neighbourhood watch schemes as opposed to the active patrolling of the urban space. This panel explores the social, political and technological transformation that these platforms and informal policing strategies bring forth and their relevance for how urban space is experienced, lived, and claimed by residents. More concretely, we are interested in questions such as the following:

• How do new digital and mobile platforms (policing apps, mobile city applications, e-governance tools) reshape claim-making by urban residents, as well as the capacity and accountability of security authorities?
• How do such policing infrastructures and informal policing practices reassemble the city through material, digital, representational, and discursive entanglements, and what kinds of city do they promote?
• How do such tools, as well as neighbourhood patrol initiatives, affect the ways in which urban space is experienced, constructed, lived, and claimed by residents of various backgrounds?
• What kinds of struggles over urban space are made visible – or, alternatively, invisible – by digital infrastructures of policing and by informal policing practices carried out in the urban space? In other words, how is the right to the city negotiated through practices of informal policing and ‘participatory surveillance’?
• What kinds of representations of the city emerge from these forms of ‘participatory surveillance’, and which selections do such representations entail in terms of the accrued policing of residents of particular class, race/ethnicity, religion, and gender?
• How are such technologies and initiatives of urban policing entangled with dynamics of gentrification and, more broadly, the interests of capital?
• How are these technologies and practices contested, resisted, subverted, or appropriated by particular urban residents or by traditional security actors?

 

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) to both [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] ,

and also upload it through the conference website by March 15th:

https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/conferences/rc21-sensing-the-city/call-for-papers/submit-your-abstract/ 

When uploading, please select session number 80.

 

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Dr. Lior Volinz

Post-doctoral researcher
Department of Criminology

Crime & Society (CRiS) Research Group

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)

Pleinlaan 2, 1050  Brussel, Belgium