[Bigdatasur] CFP Surveillance and the dossier: record keeping, vulnerability and reputational politics

Sat Mar 13 16:24:30 CET 2021

Call for Papers for an edited volume under contract with the University of
Toronto Press

Tentative Title: Surveillance and the dossier: record keeping,
vulnerability and reputational politics

Editors:
Cristina Plamadeala, PhD
Rafael de Almeida Evangelista, PhD
Ozgun Topak, PhD

Overview

The key objective of this edited collection is to offer new empirical
studies, frameworks, and concepts for studying the crucial importance of
dossiers in “surveillance societies” (Lyon 1994; Norris & Armstrong 1999),
past and present. While interesting work has been carried out on the use of
dossiers in the study of past authoritarian regimes as well as in colonial
contexts (see, e.g., Los 2004; Epstein 2004; Samatas 2005; Stoler 2010),
recent technological developments and political trends warrant a broader
inquiry into the contemporary significance of the dossier in surveillance
societies.

     The burgeoning field of contemporary authoritarian surveillance
studies is beginning to appreciate the historical significance and
continuities in dossier surveillance and the use of police, paramilitary
groups, informers and collaborators as agents of surveillance (e.g.
MacKinnon 2011; Topak 2017; 2019; Ogasawara 2017; Akbari 2020; Plamadeala
2019a, 2019b, 2020). New empirical and conceptual studies on past
realities, historical continuities and contemporary manifestations of the
dossier can be especially valuable for the examination of the history of
surveillance (e.g Boersma et.al 2014; Thompson 2016; Heynen and van der
Meulen 2019) and of contemporary surveillance societies. Toward this
purpose, the proposed volume hopes to bring together varying historical,
contemporary and international approaches, as well as case studies on the
surveillance dossier, be it paper-based or digital; gathered on individuals
or groups; deployed by governments, health agencies, schools, corporations,
or private individuals; and carried out in a variety of political settings
ranging from authoritarian to the liberal democratic. This volume,
therefore, aims to make explicit the potential continuities between
surveillance practices across rather different political and economic
regimes; and, in doing so, it aims to interrogate how surveillance policies
increasingly redraw these boundaries between regime types. Accordingly,
this book seeks to discover historical parallels to (and perhaps warnings
about) our contemporary surveillance culture.

     Even though Western media are quick to excoriate China’s fabled
“social credit system,” which uses a wide variety of data points to
politically and socially “rate” citizens, the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled
similar long-developing trends across the globe. In fact, social and
political files have a long history of use by intelligence agencies,
employers, credit bureaus, and other entities. Today, as social networks
function like a repository of investigational resources—and as these
resources are increasingly integrated with other data sets for exclusionary
purposes—there is a good reason to apply and expand this critical
perspective to emerging surveillance practices beyond China. This is
especially true in the wake of COVID-19, when many societies have embraced
snitch tip-lines, contract tracing, behavior-based corporate blacklists,
and other mechanisms of surveillance-based record-keeping.

     Furthermore, as a number of scholars have demonstrated (e.g., Marquis
2003; Solove 2004), the concept of the dossier—and more recently, that of
‘dossierveillance’ (Plamadeala 2019a; 2019b, 2020)—provides a useful
heuristic for understanding how corporations, security agencies, and other
institutions collect and store information for purposes of behavioral
management.  Dossierveillance is a type of surveillance wherein the
dossier, file (or a series of files), paper-based or virtual, lie at the
center of what makes a person afraid or reluctant to act in a certain
manner, or to disclose information that, once placed in the file, has the
potentiality to be interpreted in a way deemed or perceived as harmful for
the respective person. The dossier in dossierveillance holds power on a
person either through its existence or the possibility of its existence and
thus can be potentially employed in the future in a way that would harm the
respective person. The dossier has, as a result, panoptic implications of
‘soul training’: it is the cause of one’s self-surveillance or
self-censorship. The person subjected to dossierveillance learns, in the
process, to be careful/secretive/reluctant to offer details in respect to
the information divulged to a specific authority compiling the dossier or
to act in ways that, if taken note of, may not harm the respective person
in the future (Plamadeala 2020).
    While Plamadeala’s work on ‘dossierveillance’ and that of other
scholars working on past authoritarian regimes (e.g. Los 2004; Epstein
2004) has been employed to analyze political surveillance in totalitarian
regimes (Plamadeala 2019a, 2019b), the dossier’s broader applicability to
the study of current authoritarian regimes, liberal democratic and
corporate surveillance deserves greater attention. Along with its cognate
concepts, including the file, the folder, the personal record, and related
database technologies, the dossier highlights how the collection and
storage of personal information can be used to empower, marginalize, and
regulate access to goods, services, political rights, and professional
opportunities (Ruppert 2012). This volume, therefore, intends to offer a
fuller theorization and broader historical and critical examination of this
concept.

Questions asked:

This edited collection will ask the following questions: What constitutes a
dossier? What are the historical continuities and discontinuities that
frame the present political state of these surveillance-based files? (These
files can private and public, commercial and governmental and are kept on
citizens.) What is the role of the dossier in bureaucratic transactions and
paperwork within today’s surveillance societies? What conceptual parallels
can be drawn between new trends and well-tested mechanisms of
surveillance-based political management, such as the dossier? How did the
rise of smart technology and algorithmic intelligence provide a new impetus
to the classic political tactic of ‘gathering dirt’ on targeted
individuals? What is the role of the personal dossier in carrying out the
strategies employed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, such as contact
tracing, quarantine tracking, and immunity mapping?

Chapter topics may include but are not limited to:

The self-generated dossier

Performativity and the dossier

China’s social credit system and the dossier

Surveillance capitalism and the financial dossier

Global south, new democracies and the political dossier

>From slavery to racialized facial recognition systems

Histories of dossierveillance
Workplace surveillance and the dossier
Patient-Doctor relations, disease management and the dossier
Data motility, the dossier and the digital archive
Vulnerability, risk and the dossier
Art, surveillance and the dossier
Disease management, disability and the dossier
Policing and the dossier
The constitution of disability and the dossier
The dossier and migration (such as border control mechanisms,
identification systems, etc.)

Criminology and the dossier

Cyber crime and the dossier

Abstract submissions:

We encourage submission from scholars in surveillance studies and beyond,
whose subject of research may be looked at/reexamined through the lens of
the questions asked in this call for papers. We especially encourage
submissions that are based on scholarly works that explore themes such as
gender, class, immigration, sexuality, illness, disability, and race and
racialization.

Interested contributors should send a 350-550 word abstract and a 150-200
word bio to the following email: surveillanceandthedossier at gmail.com.

Timeline

   -

   Abstracts, written in English, are due before May 30, 2021
   -

   Short-listed papers will be notified on or around June 15, 2021
   -

   Papers due October 30, 2021
   -

   Peer-review and feedback, round 1: due by May 1, 2022
   -

   Revisions due: September 1, 2022
   -

   Peer-review and feedback, round 2: December 1, 2022
   -

   Final papers: due April 2023

Submissions will undergo peer review following the usual procedures of the
University of Toronto Press. Please note that the invitation to submit a
full chapter, following the submission of abstract, does not guarantee
acceptance for publication. The volume will include up to twelve chapters,
between 7,000 and 8000 words each (including endnotes and
bibliography). Each chapter may contain up to two illustrations.

Inquiries: Please address them to Cristina Plamadeala, at
surveillanceandthedossier at gmail.com

References

Akbari A. and Gabdulhakov R. (2019). “Platform Surveillance and Resistance
in Iran and Russia: The Case of Telegram. Surveillance & Society, 17 (1/2):
223-231.

Boersma,  K.,  R.  van  Brakel,  C.  Fonio  and  P.  Wagenaar.  (2014)
Histories
of  State  Surveillance  in  Europe  and  Beyond.  London: Routledge

Epstein C. (2004). “The Stasi: New Research on the East German Ministry of
State Security. Kritika 5(2): 321-348.

Heynen, Robert and Emily van der Meulen, eds. (2019). Making Surveillance
States: Transnational Histories. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Los, M. (2004). “The Technologies of Total Domination.” Surveillance &
Society, 2(1): 15-38.

Lyon, D. (1994). The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society.
Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.

MacKinnon, R. (2011). “China’s ‘Networked Authoritarianism.” Journal of
Democracy, 22 (2): 32-46.

Marquis, Greg (2003). “From the “dossier society” to database
networks” in Surveillance as
Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination, David Lyon
ed. London: Routledge, pp. 226-248.

Norris, C. & Armstrong, G. (1999). The Maximum Surveillance Society: The
Rise of  CCTV. Oxford: Berg.

Ogasawara, M. (2017). “Surveillance at the Roots of Everyday Interactions:
Japan’s Conspiracy Bill and its Totalitarian Effects.” Surveillance &
Society, 15 (3/4): 477-485.

Plamadeala, Cristina (2019a). “Dossierveillance in Communist Romania:
Collaboration with the Securitate, 1945- 1989” in Rob Heynen and Emily van
der Meulen, eds. Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories,
University
of Toronto Press, 215-236.

_____.2019b. “The Securitate File as a Record of Psuchegraphy” Biography, Vol.

    42, Nr. 3, special issue on “Biographic Mediation: The Uses of
Disclosure in Bureaucracy and Politics”, Vol. 42, Nr. 3, 536-56.

Plamadeala, C.  (2020). The Dossierveillance Project. Available at
www.dossierveillance.com, last accessed on February 25, 2021.

Reeves, Joshua (2017). Citizen Spies: The Long Rise of America’s
Surveillance Society. New York:  New  York University Press.

Ruppert, Evelyn (2012). “The Governmental Topologies of Database
Devices.” Theory,
Culture, and Society 29. 4/5 (2012): 116-36.

Samatas, Minas. “Studying Surveillance in Greece: Methodological and Other
Problems Related to an Authoritarian Surveillance Culture,” Surveillance &
Society 3.2/3 (2005): 181-197.

Solove, Daniel J. (2004). The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the
Information Age. New York: New York University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura (2008). Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and
Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press.

Thompson, Scott. (2016). “Real Canadians: Exclusion, Participation,
Belonging, and Male Military Mobilization in Wartime Canada, 1939-45.” Journal
of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études Canadiennes, vol. 50, no. 3, 2016,
691–726.

Topak, O. (2017). “The Making of a Totalitarian Surveillance Machine:
Surveillance in Turkey under AKP Rule,” Surveillance & Society, 15 (3/4):
535-542.

_____. (2019). “The Authoritarian Surveillant Assemblage: Authoritarian
State Surveillance in Turkey. Security Dialogue, 50 (5): 454-472.

Rafael Evangelista
Anthropologist, Social Scientist
State University of Campinas - Unicamp - Brazil
Author of Beyond Machines of Loving Grace: hacker culture, cybernetics and
democracy
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Beyond_Machines_of_Loving_Grace.html?id=kA9mDwAAQBAJ
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