The American Comparative Literature Association will meet in Utrecht from 6-9 July, 2017. The ACLA will open paper submissions to particular panels from September 1 to September 23, 2016. For more information: http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting

Please consider submitting to the following panel--and please feel free to get in touch before doing so!

Panel on "Surveillance and Democracy"

http://www.acla.org/surveillance-and-democracy

Surveillance and democracy are often felt to lie on opposite ends of a spectrum stretching from totalitarianism to political liberty, so that more surveillance would mean less democracy, and more democratic societies would choose less surveillance. Yet this widespread set of associations is not supported by theory or practice. The expansion of surveillance activities in recent decades—a proliferation termed the “new surveillance” (G. Marx) or the “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson)—enjoys widespread popular support. Opportunities to be more pervasively surveilled are embraced, particularly through what has been called the “participatory surveillance” (Albrechtslund) that characterizes the “interactive era” (Andrejevic). More fundamentally, Anthony Giddens has argued that state surveillance and “polyarchy”—government by the many—are deeply congruent, because to participate in a modern democracy simply is to be surveilled: to vote is to be registered; to pay taxes is to report income; to be a citizen is to have identification documents. 

     These kinds of representation can rather readily be assimilated either to what Hannah Arendt called “spaces of appearance” or, alternatively, to Foucault's spaces of surveillance. For Arendt, spaces of appearance are the public spaces of mutual visibility in which collectivities develop, and individuals obtain, power and agency. The individual’s appearance, on this telling, is affirmative of belonging, identity, and meaning. For Foucault, on the other hand, spaces of surveillance are disciplinary and isolating; even if this kind of visibility individualizes and shapes the subject, the process takes place primarily as domination, rather than empowerment.

    The work of art, too, offers access to appearance and representation. For this reason, the examination of acts of poesis and mimesis may well be uniquely capable of conceptualizing the vexed relationship between surveillance and democracy. Although modern and contemporary periods certainly seem to present an intensification of surveillance amidst ongoing “waves” of democratization, this panel welcomes papers addressing any phase or period, and any text or context. Further areas of interest include:

-mass surveillance; radical democracy; demos and equality

-algorithmic governance; database and archive; papers, files, documents
      
-bureaucracy; rationalization; neoliberalism

-surveillance and spectacle; the end of broadcasting; consumer profiling

-militarized policing; drones and body cameras; protest, strike, riot

-facial recognition; mutual recognition; the face of the other

-human security; human development; the “security archipelago”