September 12-13, 2019

University of Bremen, Germany

Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2019

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, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK;
  
• Nimmi Rangaswamy, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad, India.
  

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

• Big data and humanitarianism
  
• Big/open data, corruption and public debt
  
• ‘Good’ data, data justice and well-being
  
• Critical, theoretical and feminist approaches to data in/securities
  
• Data activism, citizen engagement, indigenous data sovereignty and open data
  
• Data journalism and rhetorics of data visualization in a global perspective
  
• Data-driven governance and open data
  
• Securitization and militarization of data infrastructures
  
• Data, discrimination and inequality
  
• 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
  

To propose a panel, please select "Other" in the submission system and ensure that all submitted papers that should be considered for the proposed panel include the same headline with the panel title in the abstracts. Please note that - if a proposed panel is selected by the conference committee - all panels will be open for other selected submissions.

Information/details

Please submit 250-word-paper proposals, using the online submission system at https://portal.smart-abstract.com/data-power

The deadline for paper proposals is January 31, 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 journals Big Data & Society and International Communication Gazette.

For information on travel visa, please visit the webpage.