[ecrea] Vital Mobilizations: Care and Surveillance in the Age of Global Connectivity: Workshop

Vital Mobilizations: Care and Surveillance in the Age of Global
Connectivity: Workshop | Paris, 1 & 2 June 2015
Free event - Programme and Registration on the event Blog:
https://vitalmobilizations.wordpress.com/
#vitalmobilizations

On every front, life is being put into motion: fostered and protected
against, accelerated and contained, augmented and flattened, contested
and debated. It is being measured, predicted, connected and communicated
by the most variegated actors with the most varied aims. Life has become
the object of continuous care and surveillance. Life, then, is being
mobilized. This workshop aims to explore how global connectivity
contributes to mobilize life, namely to its generalized availableness as
well as to the spontaneity and ubiquity of its contestations. It intends
to examine how life is being generated and accounted for, put in danger
and saved, disseminated and ordered in a world marked by increased
interconnectivity and precariousness. Specifically, the workshop will
pay attention to the concrete infrastructures, technologies, and
rationalities contributing to the design of spaces of care and
surveillance. Hence, in contrast with the widespread conception of a
seamless worldwide circulation of knowledge, data and expertise, our aim
would be to detail the embeddedness, plasticity and sheer materiality
inherent to vital mobilizations.

Vital Warfare

Mobilization is a category of a world of wars (Sloterdijk, 1988). It
refers to states of unrestricted, unbounded, warfare (Liang and
Xiangsui, 2002). Warfare comes with its territories, its enemies, its
heroes, its victims and its excesses. Warfare delineates friends and
foes and comes with heightened vigilance, but also with guerilla
tactics, and armed resistance. In this workshop we are interested in
what figurations of warfare are mobilizing life in an age of global
connectivity, while providing insight into contemporary movements of
insurgency and counter-insurgency. The following questions could be
addressed:

– How is warfare generating new friends and foes in times of circulating
diseases, infected travelers, ‘detached’ experts and transnational
corporations controlling knowledge and markets?

– What new militants/combatants are mobilized, for instance, in health
movements waging war against big pharma, or in the work of biohackers,
online patient communities and other forms of ‘open and citizen 
science’?

– What ‘boundary tracing’, mechanisms of exclusion, and ‘labors of
division’ are implied in contemporary practices of care and surveillance?

Digital Mobilizations

The digitalization of life transforms the way we inhabit our world(s).
Communication flows, numerical models, and computational algorithms
generate new forms of presence, new ways to project ourselves into time
and space. In other words, emergent forms of life. Implications are both
ethical and political. On the one hand, they have to do with everyday
experiences of connectivity, for instance with our relation to
ourselves, to our bodies and to our health and illness. On the other
hand, the digitalization of life participates in movements of openness
and enclosure, of inclusion and exclusion, of mediation and protest. It
contributes to shaping the government of threat and care (Feldman and
Ticktin 2010). The following questions could be addressed:

– How is digital connectivity reordering biological substance and the
materiality of life?

– How are processes of regulation, stabilization and securitization
taking shape out of endless, chaotic flows of data and information?

– How does digitalization challenge traditional forms of power over life
and what new forms of governance and resistance might emerge as a
consequence?

Sensing Danger

Digital connectivity has become highly correlated with a form of
protection against health-related risk, uncertainty, and danger. From
seasonal flu to Ebola virus outbreak, from global warming monitoring to
earthquakes and tsunamis, the last few years have for instance witnessed
a significant rise in the use of ‘sentinel devices.’ That is, detection
devices whose vigilant watchfulness and sensing of danger ‘can aid in
preparation for an uncertain, but potentially catastrophic future’ (Keck
and Lakoff 2013: 2). However, these devices do not merely predict
potential catastrophic events. In fact, they actively mobilize this
potentiality to shape the present, for instance structuring what
qualifies as possible/valuable data and as protective behaviours. The
following questions could be addressed:

– How do information systems contribute in reorienting the priorities in
global health?

– How do contemporary modes of danger sensing relate to concurrent forms
of relation to the future (anticipation, divination, prediction,
prophecy, etc.)?

– What kinds of responses are being devised in the light of these
constructions of danger and how they might be contributing to producing
particular forms of life instead of others?



Dr Tony D Sampson
Reader in Digital Culture and Communications
School of Arts and Digital Industries
UEL
Homepage: http://www.uel.ac.uk/research/profiles/adi/tonysampson/
Blog:
http://www.viralcontagion.wordpress.com<http://www.viralcontagion.wordpress.com/>
Club Critical Theory: https://clubcriticaltheory.wordpress.com/
---------------
ECREA-Mailing list
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier and ECREA.
--
To subscribe, post or unsubscribe, please visit
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
--
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Chauss�de Waterloo 1151, 1180 Uccle, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
---------------