[spectre] Sensor-Census-Censor : Call for Abstracts

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

SENSOR-CENSUS-CENSOR : Investigating Circuits of Information, 
Registering Changes of State
An International Colloquium on Information, Society, History and Politics
New Delhi, 27, 28  & 29 November 2006

(Apologies for Cross Posting)


SENSOR-CENSUS-CENSOR : Investigating Circuits of Information, 
Registering Changes of State is an International Colloquium on 
Information, Society. Politics and History that will critically examine 
and investigate regimes and technologies of information harvesting, 
management, circulation and deployment as they have developed in India 
and Europe from early modernity till today.

The colloquium, organized by the Sarai Programme at CSDS, Delhi, in 
collaboration with the Waag Society, Amsterdam, under the rubric of the 
network titled 'Towards a Culture of Open Networks', invites scholars, 
theorists, researchers and practitioners working in the areas of 
history, political economy, political theory, philosophy, culture and 
technology studies as well as artists, writers and media practitioners 
based in India and/or Europe to submit proposals for papers and 
presentations that they would like to make at the colloquium.

SENSOR-CENSUS-CENSOR will take place in the last week of November 2006 
in Delhi. Please see below for a concept outline describing the themes 
and concerns animating the colloquium.

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Information, Society, Politics, History

Information is a crucial axis of political, economic and social life. 
The nature of information practices in contemporary societies are marked 
by a radical dispersal. This dispersal does not replace, earlier 
centralizing modes of gathering information, but stands alongside it. 
The basis of governance, in all its capillary forms and at all levels, 
from the level of the neighbourhood or the workplace to that of city, 
district, province, and the nation, and continuing even at the level of 
the relationship between persons (as citizens and non citizens) and 
different nations, and between nations themselves, can continue to be 
analysed in terms of the management of information. In fact, we can 
locate the analysis of information in society, history and politics 
along the lines of tension between centralization and dispersal.

At the core of this axial reality lies a conceptual and a categorical 
distinction between what is seen to be a member of a population - an 
entity that needs to be governed, and the far more valuable category of 
the citizen - a subject (with sentience and volition) who participates 
in that governance. The recognition of subjectivity (a sensory 
operation, involving an awareness of the change of state that involves 
the transition from a silent, or incoherent statistic to a speaking, 
sentient being) is what can be seen to lie at the heart of politics. It 
can be seen as a pre-condition of the political.

The harnessing and treatment of information creates the conditions by 
which persons and citizens, a population and a citizenry, a person and a 
consumer, a network of needs and a market, an identity and a demographic 
can be invoked in varied and complex ways by the state, quasi state 
agencies of social governance, as well as by local and global economic 
forces. This activity seems to be lever for mechanisms that have to do 
with the identification, policing, mechanisms of appeal and redress, 
moral order, taxation, the disbursement of welfare, the discrimination 
between citizens and others, and between different kinds of citizens.

Such information gathering, in order to be rendered useful, has to be 
activated through territorial surveys and census forms, public and 
private archives, documents and databases, reports and records, 
surveillance cameras and electronic filters, informers and informants, 
fingerprints and biometrics,  photographs and recordings and a host of 
other technologies, methods and practices register the changes of state 
that occur in societies. These instruments and processes are so general 
in modern societies as to be part of the banal fabric of everyday life, 
especially in urban spaces.

Inspite of their generality, the circuits that solder information to 
power and established ways of doing things are constantly being hacked 
into. These quotidian episodes of information disruption, of 
unauthorised circulation and reproduction of information and a range of 
other transgressive information practices, can be seen to punctuate a 
chronicle of progress and order at crucial junctures. There is 
persistent trouble in the archives.

This colloquium is an attempt to inaugurate a body of reflection and 
research on information, society, history and politics within the ambit 
of the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing 
Societies, and raise the profile of questions about information in 
discourse in South Asia. The key questions that the colloquium will 
address are as follows :

Key Questions and Themes

Does the nature and purpose of information gathering undergo a 
transformation as we move away from relatively stable social and 
political formations to more contingent situations and domains globally? 
How does the role of the 'expert' stand in relation to new kinds of 
politics, based on contingent alliances? Is there an excess of 
information - in markets, in politics, in society?

What is the relationship between discourses of information and 
discourses of risk, security and safety?

What does information lose or gain in translation across languages and 
contexts? What for instance happens when databases generated for one 
purpose is linked to another. What happens when information crosses 
borders? What happens when information is deployed at a scale very 
different from the scale of the context in which it was generated?

How were methods of identification and information gathering 
experimented with and developed in India and other colonies and then 
perfected and deployed in Europe in the context of colonialism?

Can we build maps of the traffic in the knowledge of power across the 
circuits of empire, which takes in the work of archivists and 
historians,  museum curators and judges, the testimonies of informants 
and approvers, as much as it includes the activities of administrators, 
surveyors, anthropologists and policemen, requires to be elaborated and 
detailed.?

How have the introduction of new information technologies, such as the 
telegraph,  photography, telephones, sound recording, video, computers 
and the internet changed the course of information gathering, control 
and circulation? What implications have they had politically, how have 
they impacted on the political economy of information?

How have these technologies been used to subvert, challenge or erode the 
operations of power?

How does the unauthorised circulation and reproduction of information 
resources, piracy, copy culture, samizdat and other forms of 
transgressive information practice, affect the balance of power of 
information in any society?

How do different political systems deal with the management of 
information? What for instance is the relationship between the parallel 
histories of computing in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc 
and the demands of state action in these societies?

How can historians re-think silences and absences in the archives?

Can we construct alternative histories of archives and archiving? What 
status do archives of popular and social movements, personal collections 
and other attempts at restoring the memory of events and processes that 
  have been deliberately obscured have in relation to the knowledge 
gathering activities of the state, and of power generally?

How can political theorists examine the relationships between 
populations, citizens, information and utterance to yield different 
models of complex political realities?

What implications do the contemporary (and projected) operations of 
biometric technologies, internet filtering systems, networked 
surveillance and data retrieval and outsourcing systems have for social 
and political life today and in the near future?

The rhetoric of 'Information society' with its ideological commitment to 
notions of 'e-governance' and 'e-citizenship' and 'ICT in development' 
conveniently obscures both older continuities and inequities as well as 
recent parallels between the politics of different kinds of information 
regimes as they stretch between India /Asia and Europe. What kinds of 
correspondences and crossovers between new and old practices of 
information can we locate and identify?

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Abstract Submission Details and Requirements

We invite scholars, researchers and practitioners to respond to this 
call by sending in abstracts (not more than 500 words) of presentations 
that they would like to make, along with a brief profile about 
themselves, including details of institutional affiliation (where 
relevant). Limited support for travel and accommodation for presenters 
(only from Europe and the South Asian subcontinent) is available. Please 
indicate whether you would like to avail of this support, or can raise 
your own resources to participate in the colloquium. Applicants from the 
United States, Canada, Africa, Australia, Asia (barring South Asia) are 
advised to generate their own resources (travel and accommodation) for 
participating in the colloquium.

Last date for the submission of abstracts : 20th July, 2006
Contributors will be informed about abstracts selected for presentation 
by August 15, 2006

send in your abstracts to : infosoc at sarai.net

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The 'SENSOR - CENSUS - CENSOR' colloquium will be produced with the 
financial assistance of the European Union's EU-India Cross Cultural 
Project,<www.opencultures.net>, under the ambit of 'Towards a Cutlture 
of Open Networks' . The contents of this announcement are the sole 
responsibility of Sarai/CSDS and its Partners in this network, and can 
under no  circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the 
European  Union.