Mega-events such as the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup, and high profile political summits such as the G8 and World Trade Organization meetings have all been identified as primary targets for terrorist attack and have undergone extensive security and surveillance transformations as a result. Mega-events now serve as focal points for security and surveillance proliferation. They are microcosms of larger trends and processes, through which we can observe the complex ways security and surveillance practices are implicated in unique confluences of technology, institutional motivations, and public-private security arrangements.
In the lead-up to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, and under the auspices of the New Transparency Project, and in association with SFU's Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology, the workshop will focus on the surveillance implications of mega-events, including the following:
➢ security and surveillance and urban and critical infrastructure protection
➢ mega-events as spectacle, public ritual and states of exception
➢ the spatial articulations of security and surveillance
➢ policy implications of security, privacy and mega-events
➢ the role of the private sector and the mega-event security complex
➢ the proliferation of technologies of (in)security
➢ participant experiences of identification and surveillance practices at mega events
➢ the increasing commercialization of security and surveillance
➢ the historical and institutional legacies of mega-events
The objective of the Surveillance Games workshop is to examine these and other themes two months before, and on the very site of, the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. The questions at the centre of the workshop are relevant not only for academics. The Surveillance Games workshop will also address issues that are critically relevant to policy-makers, law enforcement agencies, non-governmental actors, athletes, spectators, private sector representatives, and media representatives. The workshop will hopefully involve representatives from each of these sectors.
Co-organizers: Professor Kevin Haggerty, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta (kevin.haggerty at ualberta.ca) and Professor Colin J. Bennett, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria (cjb at uvic.ca). The deadline for the receipt of draft papers is September 30th, 2009. Selected papers from the workshop will ultimately be published in an edited collection (publisher to be determined).
The Surveillance Studies Centre
c/o David Murakami Wood
Department of Criminology
University of Ottawa
Canada