📣Surveillance in the Majority world Network's newsletter is out!

📣 Surveillance in the Majority World Newsletter for June 2025 is out!

Surveillance in the Majority World's May Newsletter is out! featuring: - Our attendance report of the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum 2025, Lusaka, Zambia! hashtag#DRIF25 - Altman's Worldcoin Ordered to Delete Biometric Data in Kenya Over Privacy Breach

📣Our April Surveillance in the Majority World Newsletter is out! In this issue, you will read about: - Morocco’s Surveillance Infrastructure Expands Ahead of Sports Mega-Events - Indian Income Tax Bill 2025: Expanding Digital Search & Seizure Powers

📣Surveillance in the Majority World March newsletter is out! In this issue, you will read about: 1- New Book: Digital Surveillance in Africa by @phatcontroller.bsky.social & Admire Mare 2- Surveillance & Society Journal’s Dialogue Section on Authoritarian Surveillance (@survstudiesnet.bsky.social)

📣Our February newsletter is out! Read more on indigenous statistics, policing a postcolonial city, the political economy of smart surveillance in Curitiba, Brazil, Morocco’s AI-Enhanced governance of borders, predatory data & call for proposals for Africa Spyware & Digital Surveillance!

Polisky Dictatorsky Yesterday we finished another great season of the virtual workshop! Thank you all for joining!! While we prepare the Spring season, we want to let you know we will be organizing another in-person conference over the summer! The CfP will be out soon. Stay tuned!

If you are a West African early career scholar in the US or at home, check out these funding and professional development opportunities. This is open to West African scholars across disciplines. Deadline: Feb 23, 2025 Learn more & apply here: www.westafricanresearchassociation.org/fellowships/

How do autocrats stay in power? Our new research dives into the strategies of political control—repression, co-optation, and indoctrination—used across 229 autocracies from 1946 to 2010. What we found will change the way you think about authoritarian resilience. 🧵👇

Highly recommended new series in @thecontinent.org on looted #CulturalHeritage & #colonialism: "The Museum of Stolen History", curated by @shola-lawal.bsky.social, art direction by @wynonamutisi.bsky.social - Part 1 on #NgwiNdem from #Cameroon, pp. 19-22: www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/2...

Fascinating piece on the problems faced by one of #China's Belt and Road post- #smartcity / free port projects in #Pakistan... empire-building isn't easy. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees holds a webinar on the "Threat of AI and Technology to Immigrant Justice" on Wednesday, February 5, 2025 - 9:45am to 11:00am PST. Register at the link.

Our January newsletter is out! Read about Syrian surveillance revelation after Assad's fall, India’s draft data protection rules, Latin America’s 2024 overview of AI Integration, @oiioxford.bsky.social's Global Southing Internet workshop & New OA Book on Digital Sovereignty in the BRICS Countries.

A reminder to join our panel at the International Public Policy Conference in Chiang Mai/Thailand this July! The abstract submission deadline is 31 Jan ⏰ The conference has a thematic focus on the Global South and I look very much forward to all the amazing discussions!

🤖 Register and submit your abstract for the two-days workshop at the @oiioxford.bsky.social on: "Global Southing Internet, Data and AI Studies Workshop" organised by @jonasvalente.bsky.social 🗓️10:00, Tuesday 25 March - 17:00, Wednesday 26 March, 2025 👉 www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

Really excited to see that my book "Smugglers and States" (Columbia 2024) has made it into ThisWeekinAfrica's list of "18 books to read from 2024" - and in such wonderful company! thisweekinafrica.substack.com/p/18-books-t...

The sad thing is, this H1-B dust-up distracts from the fact that tech companies can (and are) increasingly outsource the vast majority of these jobs to workers who never have to step foot on American soil. ScaleAI is the most important company no one is talking about. www.inc.com/sam-blum/sca...

Haven't read the Eye of the Master, but I gather it's largely historical? Trying to think about why gen ai, now, for what ends, and finding some comfort in Midnight Notes. Especially "On Africa and self-reproducing automata"

Join our team! 🤗 Are you a graduate student interested in surveillance studies? We need an enthusiastic bookworm to help us compile an online library of publications on surveillance in the Majority World. Please follow the link for applications. We have a small budget to compensate for the hours.

Our first newsletter is up! Read about some cool new tools, the false promise of biometrics by @lhreports.bsky.social, automation on the move by @algorithmwatch.bsky.social, listen to a podcast on Afrotopia, learn about India-Isreal AI weapon systems collaboration, & maybe decide to join our team!

The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa... from @theguardian.com

We had the first Majority World track at the Surveillance Studies Conference and it was a great success! Soon we will announce more exciting programs for 2025 😎

[NEWS]: Website is live. planetaryai.net Planetary AI is a collaborative project mapping the #value chains of #AI from the Majority World perspective 1st phase examines the value chains of #data #work The 2nd phase will study materiality and environmental cost of AI.

Critical ICT4D written by a wonderful group of scholars and edited by @silviahedley.bsky.social and me is out and it's open-access with 11 chapters that reflect, problematise, and construct alternative trajectories for information and communication technologies in development contexts 🥳🎉So excited!

🚨Are you a person on the move interested in #BorderTech? Apply for our THIRD annual fellowship application with @migrationtechmonitor.com and @refugeelawlab.bsky.social! Application materials (in whatever language!) are due December 31st 2024 www.migrationtechmonitor.com/aboutmtmfell... A little🧵

The digitalisation of social protection has made it more difficult for many informal sector and marginalised workers to access their rights and entitlements. Workers & human rights specialists must participate in system design & evaluation. #DigitalRights theconversation.com/welfare-paym...

Surveillance & Society / SSN is looking for new Associate Editors for 3-year terms, to help spread our article review workload. Associate Editors are also members of the Network & Editorial Board which manages the journal and SSN. For more details, see here: ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/su...

Surveillance & Society Journal is seeking nominations for associate editor positions. Come join the amazing team at @survstudiesnet.bsky.social!

Read below to learn about the Cyber Resilience Corps (cltc.berkeley.edu/program/cybe...) and how to get involved. I'm looking forward to collaborating this group! Huge thanks to @craignewmark.bsky.social, @cltcberkeley.bsky.social, CyberPeace Institute, CISA and others! #cybercivildefense

Telecom operators, especially mobile telcos, are integrated into core aspects of people’s digital activities that folks should look closely at the implications of developments such as those highlighted by Abeba. www.orange.com/en/africa-an...

Support for at-risk researchers: 60 fully-funded fellowships (up to 24 months) for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers of any non-EU nationality to work at a research institution in the EU.

📢 New article out: "Challenging SpaceX on the US -Mexico border: Value struggles against racial authoritarian neoliberalism" I explore the relationship between ecocide, racial authoritarian neoliberalism, space exploration and far-right billionaires. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26…

most people want a quick and simple answer to why AI systems encode/exacerbate societal and historical bias/injustice and due to the reductive but common thinking of "bias in, bias out," the obvious culprit often is training data but this is not entirely true 1/

Digital Authoritarianism: we read every key paper so that you wouldn't have to! The first systematic literature review on definitions, concepts, drivers, effects and resistance to digital authoritarianism. Open Access paper published this week. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Chinese black market operators are openly recruiting government agency insiders, paying them for access to surveillance data and then reselling it online—no questions asked. www.wired.com/story/chines...

authoritarians expand restrictions on #vpns #shutdowns #threats @freedomhouse.bsky.social freedomhouse.org/article/anot...

New GloTech study discusses these Qs: What can South-to-South knowledge exchange contribute to Tech and Democracy research? What are divergence points between Global North & South tech justice advocacies? How are so-called global “whole-of-society” coalitions extractive of “local partners”? 🧿 1/6

Join our panel on "critical perspectives on global AI policy and governance" at the International Public Policy Conference in Chiang Mai/Thailand! The call for papers is below! The deadline for submitting abstracts of 300-500 words is 31 January 2025.

The Color of Surveillance: Surveillance / Resistance aims to put racial and economic justice at the center of conversations about digital era surveillance. This year’s conference will be co-hosted by the Privacy Center and the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).

Call for Papers: "Watching the Watchers: Public Oversight of Digital Surveillance in Africa", special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, edited by Jane Duncan and Sarah Chiumbu. Abstract deadline: 16th December 2024 (final submission: May 2025)