[ecrea] CFP: Media Fields Journal Issue 11: Surveillance Zones

CFP: Media Fields Journal Issue 11: Surveillance Zones

Submission Deadline: February 25, 2015



Since Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency’s systematic 
interception and collection of Americans’ private data, anxieties about 
surveillance and privacy have become even more inextricably linked to 
the digital age. Moreover, with powerful new technologies and networks, 
surveillance capabilities continue to visibly and invisibly pervade a 
vast range of quotidian spaces. These capabilities occupy both the 
aerial sphere through drones and satellites and the embodied sphere 
through devices like Google Glass, body-worn cameras, and smart watches. 
In addition, technologies such as pixel trackers and spyware are 
embedded in the virtualized (but not immaterial) spaces and practices of 
information and communication media.



As states, corporations, and citizens increasingly use surveillance 
technologies to both connect and territorialize spaces, scholars have 
responded by exploring aspects of the deeply entwined relationship 
between surveillance and spatiality. Notably, Simone A. Browne has 
considered the ‘digital epidermalization’ of biometric technologies at 
border crossings and Caren Kaplan has argued that the data collection of 
GIS and GPS have been combined in ways that ‘militarize’ and target U.S. 
consumers. Mark Andrejevic has also introduced the idea of the ‘digital 
enclosure,’ a virtual sphere in which every interaction produces 
information about itself and, in a more optimistic approach, Jason 
Farman has posited that the participatory surveillance of mobile media 
can produce new kinds of social spaces.



Building on such conversations, this issue of Media Fields Journal 
examines how surveillance and space manifest in discourses around 
complementary ideas such as security and privacy, disclosure and 
secrecy, and the technological and biological. We also seek to consider 
specific impacts of surveillance practices at different scales—among 
local, national, transnational, and global levels—and how these 
practices react to and reconfigure the political, legal, and cultural 
institutions of their milieux.



Furthermore, we aim to investigate how digital surveillance practices 
alter the interrelations of virtual and geophysical spaces and 
precariously position online users as both supervised subjects and 
surveying voyeurs. Tellingly, even as users negotiate between desires of 
selective visibility and invisibility online, the mechanisms of 
surveillance that monitor them often remain imperceptible and 
inaccessible to them. With this paradox in mind, we also invite 
perspectives on how citizens and digital users are creatively deploying 
subversive strategies to counteract state and corporate surveillance and 
create and reclaim spaces of possibility.



Additional aspects of surveillance and countersurveillance to consider 
addressing include (but are not limited to):



- Cultural Politics: the gendered, sexualized, or racialized dimensions 
of surveillance; the labor of surveillance; anti-surveillance activism 
and activist uses of surveillance.



- State Politics: the legal, economic, or historical dimensions of 
surveillance; the global and geopolitical impacts of state surveillance 
programs; Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, and the National Security Agency 
disclosures; the movement for police body-worn cameras; military and 
wartime surveillance.



- Physical spaces: archives of surveillance footage, technologies in the 
home and workplace, data monitoring sites, surveillance in public and 
private spaces, borders and airports, aerial spaces.



- Technologies: cameras, biometric readers, augmented reality devices, 
wearable devices, mobile phones, drones, satellites, RFID tags and GPS 
devices, GIS.



- Digital practices: dataveillance, online tracking and targeted 
marketing, social networks and self-surveillance, mapping and data 
visualization, live feeds, adoption of privacy software, data encryption 
and anonymization.



- Media Representation: art projects or performances that address or 
employ surveillance, sousveillance projects, reality television shows, 
fictional depictions of surveillance, the coverage of surveillance in 
journalism, tech industry discourses about surveillance, surveillance in 
documentary practices.



We welcome all submissions that engage the connections of surveillance 
and space and encourage contributions from a range of disciplines and 
methodologies. We seek essays of 1500–2500 words, digital art projects, 
and interviews (text, audio, or video).



Please review the detailed guidelines at: 
http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/guidelines/ and see earlier issues at 
http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/.


Feel free to contact issue co-editors Daniel Grinberg and Lisa Han with 
questions. E-mail all submissions and inquiries to 
(submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org). Please include a short biographical 
statement and abstract with your submission.





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