Senior Reseach Seminar with Dr Vita Peacock (King's College, London)

Dr Vita Peacock (King's College, London)Privacy as Unfolding: German Netzpolitik and the Legacy of Colonial Registration

 

This seminar draws on ongoing ethnography with privacy activists in Germany to explore ideas of non-monitoring as allowing for growth and change, in contrast to the temporal immobilities that can accompany surveillance infrastructures. It places these sensibilities in relation to memories of authoritarian surveillance in Germany, that themselves followed the morphology of the colonial census. Providing shared knowledge of the possibility of function creep - where technologies designed for one purpose may be used for another - these memories continue to produce a persistent impetus for self-definition with regard to acts of monitoring, placing 'Netzpolitik' among the vangaurd of contemporary debates around privacy and surveillance.