[ecrea] CfP VANDA: "Portable panopticons: (in)visibility, intimacy and exposure in the age of social networks"

- CALL FOR PAPERS -

Please consider joining our panel PORTABLE PANOPTICONS: (IN)VISIBILITY, 
INTIMACY AND EXPOSURE IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS at the VIENNA 
ANTHROPOLOGY DAYS (VANDA), 19^th -22^nd September 2018.

Abstracts (max. 4000 characters) should be submitted no later than *June 
1^st , 2018* via the conference website: 
https://vanda.univie.ac.at/call-for-papers/

Session conveners: Roger Casas (Institute for Social Anthropology, 
Austrian Academy of Sciences) & Hannah Klepeis (Max Planck Institute for 
Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale)

Panel abstract:

Mercilessly dissolving dreams and promises of freedom through universal 
access to information, technological advances including biometrics, 
digital recognition (and the concurrent spread of CCTV cameras), data 
management, and the ubiquity of mobile connectivity, are making 
Foucauldian dystopias of total visibility very real. While new 
technologies are facilitating the acquisition and management of personal 
data on the part of states and corporations, providing these 
institutions with unprecedented power to assess and direct individual 
political and market choices, a defining feature of these processes is 
the democratization of surveillance – the transfer of responsibility for 
the policing of behaviour from political and economic institutions, to 
individual consumers themselves.

At the same time new technologies provide fresh opportunities for the 
anonymous self-fashioning of identities and the development of virtual 
‘communities of complicity’ (Steinmüller 2014). The present ubiquity of 
social networks and apps capable of recording and storing video and 
audio files in portable communication devices threatens us with the 
spilling over of the private into the public sphere, in the form of 
compromising images, sounds and written words. This risk of exposure of 
individual and group ‘cultural intimacies’ (Herzfeld 1996) has provoked 
an unprecedented crisis of visibility concerning spaces previously 
sealed off from the public (student dorms, monastic cells, military 
barracks, karaoke rooms, etc.), defined in turn by a rising awareness of 
the self and self-presentation, and an ever-present policing of 
political and moral personae.

This panel calls for contributions aiming at exploring this rapidly 
evolving landscape, defined by the ambiguous and fluid dynamics between 
the offline and the online, the public and the private, the visible and 
the invisible. We would like to look at the ways in which refined 
instruments of (self-)control and the general expectation to be not only 
connected and available, but visible at all times, are forcing unwitting 
individuals around the world (including anthropologists themselves) to 
participate in the endlessly creative patrolling, evaluating, and 
regulating of behaviour and discourse, in the process supporting a 
de-politicization of (public) morality through the immediate consumption 
of intimacies.

Do not hesitate to contact us for further questions: 
(Roger.Casas /at/ oeaw.ac.at) <mailto:(Roger.Casas /at/ oeaw.ac.at)>; 
(klepeis /at/ eth.mpg.de) <mailto:(klepeis /at/ eth.mpg.de)>

We are looking forward to receiving your contributions.

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