[Linganth] CFP - Speech under Surveillance: Recording Technologies and the Archiving of Evidence

Tue Mar 27 19:44:20 UTC 2018

Dear Colleagues,

We are looking for additional  panelists interested in participating in a session on speech, surveillance, and recording technologies for the 2018 AAA Meetings in San Jose.  Our abstract is below.  If you are interested in joining the proposed panel, please send your 250-word abstract to Sherina Feliciano-Santos (sfs at sc.edu) and Sonia Das (sd99 at nyu.edu) by April 10th.  We aim to select panel participants by April 13th.

Session title: Speech under Surveillance: Recording Technologies and the Archiving of Evidence
Organizers: Sherina Feliciano-Santos, University of South Carolina and Sonia Das, New York University

With cameras on police officers’ bodies, street corners, traffic lights, elevators in office buildings, and seemingly ubiquitous smartphones, this panel is concerned with the material affordances and impacts of the use of video and audio recording surveillance technologies upon a number of interactional and bureaucratic domains and linguistic practices.  In particular, we attend to (1) the influence of surveillance technologies on the self- or peer-monitoring behaviors of social actors; (2) the production of legal evidence through video and audio recordings and the archives constructed through these technologies; and (3) the interpretive and institutional frameworks involved in assessing how the forms of evidence thus produced become understood and validated.

This panel builds on the findings of scholars who have found that video and audio surveillance, while envisioned to make police officers more accountable to any bias with regard to the assessment of “suspicious behavior” (Sack 1972), have minimally impacted arrest rates across the United States (Ripley and Williams 2017). In fact, the re-analysis of the evidentiary use of videorecordings in the Rodney King trials suggests that surveillance technologies have even facilitated officer acquittals (Goodwin 1994).  However, in the context of federal and state prisons, a lack of surveillance technologies has enabled abuse against prisoners to go on undetected (Winerip and Schwirtz 2015). In order to address these findings, the papers in this panel offer a closer look at the differentiated ways that social actors identified with different racial, ethnic, gendered, and classed categories respond to and become framed by surveillance technologies, thus reflecting and/or challenging broader patterns of discrimination. What ethical concerns and sociolegal categories emerge from applying surveillance technologies to the domains of peacekeeping and law enforcement (Banton 1964; Bittner 1967)?

Additionally, these papers aim to make sense of the expectations and assumptions that underlie the evaluation of behaviors captured as video- and audio-recorded data (Woznicki and Frois 2016). Ethnographic research of documentation practices in the context of administrative bureaucracies such as hospitals has highlighted how databases and archives reconfigure the subject and its personal information as needed, in effect both transforming and fragmenting the narrative as it makes its way through medical and other institutions (Hull 2012: 262; Bowker 2005; Howell 1995; Messick 1993; Rabinow 1996). These studies also emphasize the importance of tracing the interdiscursive chains of decontextualization and recontextualization as evidence makes its way through bureaucracies, from the act of its production to its transformation into recognizable genres of legally or non-legally binding representations of speech.  What are the outcomes of these interdiscursive processes and how are language varieties and linguistic practices themselves transformed through the archiving of digital evidence?

Overall, we seek papers that engage with the role played by digital technologies of surveillance upon, for example, the nature of face-to-face interactions, the production of archives and evidence, the use of social media, and the workings of bureaucratic institutions.  We hope to attract papers that conceptualize the material affordances of surveillance technologies involving audio and video recordings across a broad range of contexts, including but not limited to policing, security, customer relations, border crossing, peacekeeping, etc.

Thanks!

Sherina

________________________________
Sherina Feliciano-Santos
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of South Carolina, Columbia
Gambrell 423
803-777-5760
sfs at sc.edu
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/anth/sherina-feliciano-santos

[cid:7ADD5711-B92A-40C0-9177-F74522BFC349]

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