
This event aims to take stock of ongoing research that engages and explores the digital, in relation to practices that define, control and steer societies and individual behavior. One of our goals is to discuss the potential and the limits of different critical approaches to surveillance technologies, but also to examine the rise of digital data and practices in various areas of societal life.
Algorithms, computers, databases, smartphone applications, interfaces and the Internet are among the technologies that support, hamper, or more in general, influence our daily doings. News about the scope of mass-surveillance, the occurrence of data security breaches, and the promises of potential of big data analytics, remind us how the digital has become part and parcel of our socio-political environment. While its inner workings remain often discreet and out-of-sight, the digital increasingly mediate our everyday lives. This event suggests that digital technologies, (big) data and practices are not only central to different political arenas, but that they in fact have begun to bring about their own political workings. If digital things play a constitutive role within our societies, how can we discuss something like politics and the digital, as well as the politics of the digital?
Some key questions are:
- What does it mean to adopt a critical take in relation to the digital?
- What are the most promising entry points for studying the political dimensions of the digital? (E.g. algorithms, critical infrastructure, institutional policies, societal controversies, etc.)
- What are the methodological challenges raised by the growing variety and distribution of surveillance practices?
- How are security and risk management redefined by practices of data processing?
- How do institutional politics and policy-making relate to the digital? And what are the political arenas that digital practices give rise to?
Registration
Program
22 November 2016 (08:30 - 16:00)
Public
| After Snowden: New Arenas for Politics and the Digital & Announcement of Special Issue "Politics and the Digital" (forthcoming 2017)Chair and host: Mareile Kaufmann (University of Oslo (UiO), PRIO, editor of the special issue on "Politics and the Digital") Introductory comment: Elisabeth Eide (Vice President of Norwegian PEN, Professor of Journalism at the University College in Oslo. Brief video-link intervention: Jan Albrecht (Member of the European Parliament rapporteur on the General Data Protection Regulation and vice-chair of the LIBE Committee) Norwegian PEN awarded Snowden the Ossietzky-price in November 2016.
Roundtable participants:
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10:00-10:30 | Break |
Panel 1 | Algorithms, Surveillance and Data ProtectionChair: Kristoffer Lidén (PRIO)
Panel participants:
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12:30-14:00 | Lunch |
Panel 2 | Security-as-Surveillance in EuropeChair: Mareile Kaufmann (University of Oslo & PRIO)
Panel participants:
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23 November 2016 (NordSTEVA Digital Matters Research Group)
Panel 3 | Data-driven Societal SecurityChair:
Rocco Bellanova (PRIO)
Panel participants:
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12:00-13:00 | Lunch |
13:00-13:30 | NordSTEVA Digital Matters business meetingChair: Kristoffer Lidén (PRIO) |
