[Commlist] Dark Social Spaces Event & CFP

*The Global Digital Publics Network (GDPN), Deakin University*

/warmly invites you to the/

**

*Dark Social Spaces Event*

Deakin Downtown

Tower 2 level 12/727 Collins St

Melbourne, Australia

*7 & 8 October 2019*

*The Provocation*

Scholarship on the Darknet and dark social spaces tends to focus on the 
uses of encryption and other privacy enhancing technologies to engender 
resistance acts. The actors using these technological affordances are 
commonly identified as subcultural groups, activists, marginalised 
cultures and communities, trolls and socially divisive actors who seek 
to evade, refuse or disrupt institutional power. We would suggest, 
however, that this approach creates an artificial binary positioning a 
fringe of radical actors against institutions of governance, regulation 
and control. Similarly, approaches that distinguish between social 
agency and technological affordances protecting privacy, on the one 
hand, and institutional regulation and centralised surveillance on the 
other, do not acknowledge how powerful institutional actors use these 
decentralised technologies to reinforce their authority and control. 
This event brings together scholars, activists, and artists who are 
pushing past these binaries to create new approaches to darknet and dark 
social studies.

**

*Keynote Robert W. Gehl, Monday, 7 October 2019 2-4pm*

Robert W. Gehl, is a Fulbright Canada Research Chair and an associate 
professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. 
Gehl is the author of Reverse Engineering Social Media, winner of the 
2015 Association of Internet Researchers Nancy Baym Award. In his most 
recent book, Weaving the Dark Web Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P 
(2018) Gehl uses the concept of legitimacy as a window into the Dark 
Web, presenting three distinct meanings of legitimate: legitimate force, 
or the state's claim to a monopoly on violence; organizational 
propriety; and authenticity. REGISTER FOR KEYNOTE AT 
darksocial.eventbrite.com

*Workshop Tuesday, 8 October 2019 2-4pm*

In this workshop, we will provoke engagement and consideration of the 
implications of more entangled and complex views of dark actors and 
privacy technologies. The questions we raise address the tensions where 
technologies act as a support for privacy, connection, and activism 
whilst also facilitating practices of decentralised surveillance and 
social engineering that re-enforce existing power structures. Questions 
may include but are not limited to the following:

  * If we continue to view civic action and social inclusion through
    frames of resistance, diversity and social cohesion, then how do we
    respond to more ambivalent developments in these socio-technical
    environments?
  * How can digital darkness both shield and reveal social currents or
    identify emergent forms of social disruption?

*150-word workshop abstracts Due 17 July*, to (Toija.Cinque /at/ deakin.edu.au) 
<mailto:(Toija.Cinque /at/ deakin.edu.au)>

*Selected best papers will be submitted towards a Special Issue in 2021*.

/~On behalf of the organising committee: Alexia Maddox, Toija Cinque, 
Luke Heemsbergen, (Deakin University) and Amelia Johns (University of 
Technology Sydney)./


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