[acc-cca-l] 3rd international Data Power conference, 12th/13th September 2019, Bremen, Germany

[Merlyna Lim]

3rd international Data Power conference
Thursday 12th and Friday 13th SEPTEMBER 2019, University of Bremen, Germany

With increasingly globalized digital infrastructures and a global digital political economy, we face new concentrations of power, leading to new inequalities and insecurities with respect to data ownership, data geographies and different data-related practices. It is not only a concentration of power by a few corporations, but also a concentration of the availability of data in 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, data visualisations.

The Global in/securities theme of the 2019 Data Power conference attends to questions around these phenomena, asking: How does data power further or contest global in/securities? How are global in/securities constructed through or against data? How do civil society actors, government, people engage with societal and individual in/securities through and with data? What are appropriate ontologies to think about data and persons? How may we envisage a just data society? And what does decolonizing data in/securities look like?

This conference creates a space to reflect on these and other critical issues relating to data’s in/security and its decolonizing. Confirmed keynote speakers are:

* Virginia Eubanks, University at Albany, USA;
* Jack Linchuan Qiu, Chinese University, Hongkong;
* Seeta Peña Gangadaran, LSE, UK;
* Nimmi Rangaswamy, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad, India.

Papers and panels are invited on the following – and other – topics:

* Big data and humanitarianism
* ‘Good’ data, data justice and well-being
* Data, discrimination and inequality
* Data activism, citizen engagement, indigenous data sovereignty and open data
* Critical, theoretical and feminist approaches to data in/securities
* Data journalism and rhetorics of data visualization
* Data-driven governance and open data
* Securitization and militarization of data infrastructures
* Emerging in/securities through algorithms and automated decision-making
* Forensic data, human rights and refugees
* Decolonizing data in/securities and data labor
* Machine learning, developmentalism and human security

Information/details

* Please submit 250-word-paper proposals, using the online submission system at the conference webpage: https://www.uni-bremen.de/data-power-global-insecurities/ (to be opened soon).
* The deadline for paper proposals is 31st January 2019.
* The conference fee is 200 Euro, and 100 Euro for students. There will be travel grants for participants from the global south and PhD student fee waivers (please indicate the need when applying).
* The organising committee will select papers for a special theme proposal to be submitted to the peer reviewed journal Big Data & Society.
* For information on travel visa, please visit the following web page: https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/borders-and-visas/visa-policy/schengen_visa_en. Letters of invitation will be sent by the conference organizers.