Call for Papers

Surveillance and Society online journal
"Smart Borders and Mobilities: Spaces, Zones, Enclosures"
Deadline for submissions: 1st March 2007.

Call for Papers

Surveillance and Society online journal
"Smart Borders and Mobilities: Spaces, Zones, Enclosures"
Edited by Louise Amoore, Stephen Marmura, and Mark Salter
Deadline for submissions: 1st March 2007
Publication date: September 2007

The border has been called the fundamental political institution, delineating between inside/outside, us/them, safe/dangerous, known/unknown. With the increased ability of state and commercial agents to overcome and reinvent traditional sovereign lines, borders are instantiated throughout society not simply at border posts but also at airports, in databases, through international call centers, and with identity documents. Cross-border data-flows may complicate realities already identified as problematic within information-based societies. Surveillance practices in public spaces, border zones, and the workplace may become both more nuanced and more intrusive, as we see with anti-globalization protests, Schengen border zones, and in low-wage non-unionized labour shops. The tracking and identification of specific individuals or groups by government agencies may be intensified. Consumers may be increasingly subjected to "foreign" marketing and advertising strategies not legally sanctioned within their own societies. Citizens may have data transmitted and analyzed far from the point of origin or of collection in the cases of passenger profiling or the more general war on terror. Wider and wider risk groups are being surveilled in ways that circumvent or restructure borders.

Surveillance and Society is seeking papers that examine how borders produce or reinforce spaces, zones, or enclosures and the processes, structures, and institutions of control that exceed the border. The editors are interested in how the mobility of data itself is transforming, what kinds of boundaries and exceptions this produces, how this rearticulates relationships between science, law and the political, and how the border is realized via data. We are seeking both theoretical and empirical articles which illuminate this set of issues. In addition to sociology, the subject of borders and surveillance holds relevance for a wide range of academic disciplines including geography, law, cultural
anthropology, philosophy, and political science. We encourage contributions which draw attention to geo-demographic, legal, cultural, ethical, technological, political and/or social-economic aspects of data-flows.

Possible topics of interest include:

• Implications for privacy in cross-border data-flows;
• Effect of RFID or biometric technologies on both identity documents and
  border policing;
• Dataveillance of financial transactions by both commercial enterprises
  and governments;
• Strategies of risk displacement and risk management through
  knowledge-industries;
• International surveillance of marginal or "dangerous" populations;
  
• International comparative studies of state approaches to the governance
  of cross-border data;
• Comparisons between corporate vs. state influence over data-flows;
• Divergences in relevant public attitudes towards privacy and personal
  data flows in different countries;
• Parallels and anomalies concerning data-flows and international flows of
  goods, currency and persons.

Submissions should be sent electronically to Emily Smith at
smithea at post.queensu.ca by March 1st 2007 with a publication date of September 2007.

We welcome full academic papers, opinion pieces, review pieces, poetry, artistic, and audio-visual submissions. Please see www.surveillance-and-society.org for further submission guidelines.