The Documentation of Individual Identity: Historical and Comparative Perspectives since 1500 » CCTV

Study Day: Surveillance and the Street

jamesrbrown — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:41:36 +0000

Flickr/TedRheingold (CC)

A study day on ‘Surveillance and the Street’ will take place at the University of Bath on 19 March 2010. Organized under the auspices of ‘Street Life and Street Culture: Between Early Modern Europe and the Present’, which is funded by the AHRC as part of the Beyond Text initiative, the study day will consider themes relating to surveillance and technology as they impinge upon and inform the public space of the street. For participants and programme information, see the study day flyer (pdf). Those wishing to participate should e-mail Claire Hogg (C.Hogg@bath.ac.uk) by 8 March.

CFP: The Political Economy of Surveillance

jamesrbrown — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:20:58 +0000

A workshop on ‘The Political Economy of Surveillance’, jointly organized by The New Transparency Major Collaborative Research Initiative and the Living in Surveillance Societies COST action, is currently seeking papers. The workshop, which will be held at the Open University Business School (Milton Keynes) on 9-12 September 2010, will explore the dynamics of the international surveillance industry, and abstracts are encouraged to address a wide range of topics relating the nature and extent of the surveillance industry and its relationship to the private and public sectors, the military, technological developments, and regulatory bodies. The deadline for the submission of 500-word proposals is 30 April 2010; for further details and submission instructions, see the websites of the organizing projects.

CCTV Takes to the Skies

jamesrbrown — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:38:15 +0000

'Guardian Spirit of the Waters', by Odilon Redon (1878). Wikimedia Commons.

The Guardian and The Telegraph newspapers ran stories this weekend reporting that UK police are planning to use unmanned ‘spy drones’, originally developed for surveillance in military contexts, to monitor antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves, and fly-tippers. According to the reports, an arms manufacturer is currently developing the so-called Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) – capable of taking high-resolution images from heights of up to 20,000ft – for civilian deployment, and that the drones could be in use by local forces in time for the London Olympics in 2012. For the full reports, see here (Guardian [includes video and comments]) and here (Telegraph).

Surveillance Studies Centre Launches

jamesrbrown — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:56:56 +0000

The Surveillance Project, the interdisciplinary, international research initiative based in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University under the direction of IdentiNet member David Lyon, relaunched today as the Surveillance Studies Centre. The SSC will both expand the existing research programme (in particular The New Transparency Project) and serve as a platform for new funding applications. It will also ‘advance the surveillance studies field by way of workshops, lectures and seminars, empirical work, publishing, community outreach, liaising with policy and activist groups, and student training’. For full details, see the new centre website.

CFP: Forensic Image and Video Processing

macsp2 — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:45:14 +0000

Posted by Massimiliano Pagani. Paper submission is now open for the ‘Special Session on Forensic Image and Video Processing’ at the 6th International Symposium on Image and Signal Processing and Analysis (ISPA 2009) that will take place in in Salzburg, Austria on 16-18 September 2009. The objective of this Special Session is to bring together researchers and police forces in order to answer new forensic challenges with state of the art image and video processing research. For more info see the conference website; the call for papers is also available as a pdf. The deadline for the submission of full papers is 15 April 2009.

Summer School: New Approaches to Political History

jamesrbrown — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:11:43 +0000

A summer school on ‘New Approaches to Political History: Writing British and German Contemporary History’ will be held at the German Historical Institute, London, on 7-12 September 2009. Within a general focus on new definitions of the political and methodology, one of the four thematic strands concentrates on Politics in a Globalised World: Security and Transnationalisation, and will explore issues such as CCTV, passport controls and other international identity documents. The school is open to PhD students and post-docs working on British, German and British-German history, and the deadline for applications is 1 March 2009; for further details and how to apply see H-Net or the GHI website.

Britain: A ‘Surveillance State’?

jamesrbrown — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:53:02 +0000

An Upper House report on ‘Surveillance: Citizens and the State’ has warned that Britain risks becoming a ‘surveillance state’. The report, published today by the Lords Constitution Committee, argues that the proliferation of CCTV cameras (the highest density in Europe) and the growth of the UK’s DNA database (‘the largest in the world’) are undermining democracy, and recommends a raft of controls including tighter judicial oversight of surveillance and new codes of practice for the use of CCTV. For full details see BBC News, while the report itself can be accessed here. Picture: stock.xchng