168. Surveillance, Privacy, and Policing: Emerging Dynamics of Digital Citizenship
Pratik Nyaupane, University of Southern California; Rohan Grover, rohan.grover@usc.edu;
How do digital governance technologies mediate experiences of citizenship in emerging democracies? The value of technology in digital governance-or 'e-governance'-has been long examined as a source of technocratic authority with broad implications for power, access, and inclusion. This panel seeks to explore this relationship through critical examination of the production, infrastructure, and relationality of those technologies.
As states with divergent relationships and histories with colonialism and democracy increasingly lean into digital modes of mediating citizen-state relations, this calls for a significant examination of digital citizenship to understand the stakes of emerging trends. We are especially interested in how these dynamics interact heterogeneously with coloniality across different contexts through comparative or single-country analyses in and across the global South, although we are not exclusively interested in postcolonial states.
Papers may respond to but are not limited to the following questions:
- How do data governance and privacy serve as a vehicle for modulating/moderating notions of citizenship and citizen-state relations?
- How do governance technologies encode citizen-state relations through datafication? What opportunities does datafication offer for control, surveillance, and policing-or, alternatively, for advocacy, social movements, and democratic action?
- How do states' use of technology dynamically relate to, encode, affect, and interact with citizen-state relations?
- How does digital governance of citizenship affect the conceptualization of citizenship through borders, immigration, and non-citizens?
