Conference: "Surveillance Cultures"

Surveillance has grown into such a ubiquitous part of our private and professional lives within just a few years that many of its practices as well as its various functions seem to have gone unnoticed or at least unproblematized. Privacy groups do not tire to warn us of the immense cultural-political and social consequences of this landslide shift. Attempts to evade or disrupt the omnipresent technologies of surveillance that surround us, however, seem utterly futile in the face of today’s lived realities. Communication has become as unimaginable without the option of constant traceability as have global trade and private consumption. And while globally operating corporations invest ever more money into the development of new data mining techniques to optimize the predictivity of consumer behavior, security and safety discourses avail themselves of the full ideological force connected to issues of surveillance and security to help push agendas all across the political spectrum.

At the same time, while technological and political developments have facilitated a rapid increase in the expedition as well as the scope of every-day surveillance practices, surveillance is anything but a new phenomenon of the 21^st century. Earlier forms of government surveillance, systemic structures designed towards the control of specific social groups, the tacit yet effective policing of certain behaviors, and strategic market and consumer manipulation have been a staple of many cultures across the globe for centuries.

This symposium offers a platform to address the political-cultural dimension of surveillance practices and surveillance techniques within our current empirical realities as well as the historical contexts from which they arose. It will also look into the ways in which cultural representations of surveillance in various media grant insight into the particular experiences generated through exposure to and effecting of surveillance.

Keynote speakers: Richard Grusin (Milwaukee), Jörn Ahrens (Giessen)

Workshop by Dietmar Kammerer (Marburg)