[Commlist] CfP: "Global Perspectives on Surveillance" (Jump Cut)

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*Global Perspectives on Surveillance*
Call for Papers

Special Section of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 
(editor-in-chief Julia Lesage)
https://www.ejumpcut.org/home.html <https://www.ejumpcut.org/home.html>
Section Editor: Gary Kafer (University of Chicago)

*Description*
This special section of Jump Cut seeks original research and review 
essays that examine the global circuits of surveillance that 
increasingly mark contemporary social and political life.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, surveillance studies scholars 
proclaimed the arrival of a “surveillance society” (Marx 1985; Gandy 
1989; Lyon 1994), which soon became global by the turn of the century 
following the attacks on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Lyon 2004; Murakami 
2009; Ström 2020). In many ways indebted to the emergence of novel 
digital and communication tools, such critiques called attention to 
increasing levels of tracking practices by national governments and 
corporations to preempt threats and safeguard capital. No doubt, the 
global parameters of surveillance were put on full display with the 
Snowden leaks of 2013 as the world became cognizant of The Five Eyes 
intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United 
Kingdom, and the United States), which was soon followed by media 
coverage of China’s Digital Silk Road Initiative.

And yet, even as these developments exposed the globality of 
surveillance systems, such frameworks tend to maintain the ‘global’ as 
simply a reference point for the ‘Global North’ and its centers of data 
accumulation and exchange. Such narratives are troublesome, not in the 
least for the way that they ignore how surveillance has historically 
always been transnational in scope, such as in the development of 
biometrics and identification documents in chattel slavery and penal 
colonies across colonial and imperial regimes (Browne 2015; Heynen and 
van der Meulen 2019). At the same time, some global frameworks ignore 
how many surveillance devices are first developed and tested in sites of 
settler colonial and capitalist violence—often in the Global 
South—before being distributed by international defense industries for 
use elsewhere, such as in Israel’s occupation of Palestine (Halper 2015) 
or the repression of indigenous communities at the borders of settler 
states (Schaeffer 2022).

Following suit, this special section of Jump Cut explores how the global 
remains a fraught, if not necessary, framework to grapple with the 
contemporary politics of surveillance. We invite research that 
approaches such issues from the fields of media studies, film studies, 
visual studies, communication studies, and related disciplines to 
consider how surveillance is a global process located within 
historically situated cultural, political, and social practices. Such 
research can address concerns in the twenty-first century as well as 
longer histories of surveillance. Potential topics include (but are not 
limited to):
• Technologies of border security
• Biometrics – past, present, future
• Internet infrastructures
• Ecologies of resource extraction
• Platforms and outsourced labor
• Militarization of police
• Counter-practices to surveillance
• Global surveillance and documentary aesthetics
• Representations of global surveillance in entertainment media
• Social media in the Global South
• Algorithms and discrimination

*Submission Information:*
We welcome a range of submissions including article length essays, short 
reflection papers, opinion pieces, book reviews, and film reviews.

Submissions will undergo a peer-review and revision process prior to 
publication. Submissions should be original work, neither previously 
published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All 
references to previous work by contributors should be masked in the text 
(e.g., “Author 2020”). Please submit your document in a MS 
Word-compatible format.

No payment is required from authors.

*Timeline*
Submissions should be emailed to (gkafer /at/ uchicago.edu) 
<mailto:(gkafer /at/ uchicago.edu)> by January 15, 2024. Please put “JC – 
Global Surveillance” in the subject line.

Decisions will be communicated by the end of March 2024.

Final revisions will be due June 1, 2024.

The special section will be published in a forthcoming issue of Jump Cut 
in the winter of 2024.

*References:*
Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. 
Durham: Duke University Press.
Gandy, Oscar. 1989. “The Surveillance Society: Information Technology 
and Bureaucratic Social Control.” Journal of Communication 39: 61–76.
Halper, Jeff. 2015. War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and 
Global Pacification. London: Pluto Press.
Heynen, Robert, and Emily van der Meulen (eds.). 2019. Making 
Surveillance States: Transnational Histories. Toronto: University of 
Toronto Press.
Lyon, David. 1994. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance 
Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lyon, David. 2004. “Globalizing Surveillance.” International Sociology 
19: 135–49.
Marx, Gary. 1985. “The Surveillance Society: The Threat of 1984-style 
Techniques.” The Futurist 6: 21–6.
Murakami Wood, David. 2009. “The ‘Surveillance Society’: Questions of 
History, Place and Culture.” European Journal of Criminology 6(2): 179-194.
Schaeffer, Felicity Amaya. 2022. Unsettled Borders: The Militarized 
Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land. Durham: Duke 
University Press.
Ström, Timothy Erik. 2020. Globalizing Surveillance. Lanham, MD: Rowman 
& Littlefield Publishers.

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