The two-day, international conference organized by ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen (Germamy) in cooperation with the Universities of Carleton (Canada) and Sheffield (UK) “DATA POWER 2019” will be held at the Unviersity of Bremen (12.-13.09.2019). The deadline for submissions is January 31st, 2019.
“DATA POWER: global in/securities” focuses on critical questions about data’s power, reflecting on the social and cultural consequences of data becoming increasingly pervasive in our lives. With its critical approach towards datafication in relation to power in a wide variety of areas, the conference will focus on dialogues between Global North and Global South perspectives. Current issues of the ever more ubiquitous power of digital data manifest themselves in societies and cultures all over the world that are increasingly mediatized which means a growing interdependence of individuals, collectivities and organisations with digital communication media.With increasingly globalized digital infrastructures and a global digital polit12ical economy, we face new concentrations of power, leading to new inequalities and insecurities with respect to data ownership, data geographies and different forms of data-related practices. It is not only a concentration of power by a few corporations, but also a concentration of the availability of data on individual regions of the world. This includes (exerting) power about data (infra)structures and processes of data creation, data collection, data access, data processing, data interpretation, data storing, and data visualisations.
Therefore, the global “DATA POWER” conference will bring together scholars from the Global South and the Global North in order to jointly address pressing questions around these phenomena. Confirmed keynote speakers are:
- Virginia Eubanks, University at Albany, USA
- Jack Linchuan Qiu, Chinese University Hongkong, China
- Seeta Peña Gangadaran, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
- Nimmi Rangaswamy, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
More information here: https://www.uni-bremen.de/data-power-global-insecurities
CfP here: https://www.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/sites/datapower/cfp_datapower_2019_bremen.pdf