Call for Papers |Data Power Conference 2019

Academic Events
Marcin Ignac (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Data Power Conference 2019: abstract submission deadline 31st January 2019

With increasingly globalized digital infrastructures and a global digital political economy, we face new concentrations of power, leading to new inequalities and insecurities with respect to data ownership, data geographies and different data-related practices.  It is not only a concentration of power by a few corporations, but also a concentration of the availability of data in individual regions of the world. This includes (exerting) power about data (infra)structures and processes of data creation, data collection, data access, data processing, data interpretation, data storing, data visualisations. 

The Global in/securities theme of the 2019 Data Power conference attends to questions around these phenomena, asking: How does data power further or contest global in/securities? How are global in/securities constructed through or against data? How do civil society actors, government, people engage with societal and individual in/securities through and with data? What are appropriate ontologies to think about data and persons? How may we envisage a just data society? And what does decolonizing data in/securities look like?

This conference creates a space to reflect on these and other critical issues relating to data’s in/security and its decolonizing. Confirmed keynote speakers are:

  • Virginia Eubanks, University at Albany, USA;
  • Jack Linchuan Qiu, Chinese University, Hongkong;
  • Seeta Peña Gangadaran, LSE, UK;
  • Nimmi Rangaswamy, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad, India. 

Papers and panels are invited on the following – and other – topics:

  • Big data and humanitarianism
  • ‘Good’ data, data justice and well-being
  • Data, discrimination and inequality
  • Data activism, citizen engagement, indigenous data sovereignty and open data
  • Critical, theoretical and feminist approaches to data in/securities
  • Data journalism and rhetorics of data visualization
  • Data-driven governance and open data
  • Securitization and militarization of data infrastructures
  • Emerging in/securities through algorithms and automated decision-making
  • Forensic data, human rights and refugees
  • Decolonizing data in/securities and data labor
  • Machine learning, developmentalism and human security

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