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T040


Cybersecurity & digital territory: Nation, Identity, and Citizenship 
Convenors:
Winifred Poster
Norma Möllers (Queen's University)
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Stream:
Tracks
Location:
112b
Sessions:
Friday 2 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid

Short Abstract:

The aim of this session is to explore cybersecurity as it configures and touches upon intersecting issues of national (in)security, national economy, and citizenship. We particularly welcome feminist, critical race, and post-colonial perspectives on cybersecurity.

Long Abstract:

Although cybersecurity concerns predate the popularization of the Internet, governments across the world have only begun relatively recently to create specialized policies and organizations dedicated to cybersecurity. These in turn points to some contradictory processes in internet governance: the facilitation of exchange across borders on the one hand, and increased state intervention and regulation on the other hand. Such interventions include, among other things, massive systems of information gathering and surveillance, both on national populations and across borders. In the process, citizens are conceived of as data subjects, where tensions of nationhood are played out, identified, and remedied.

Against this backdrop, renewed state intervention can be understood as efforts to territorialize the seemingly 'borderless' world of cyberspace, targeting a range of intersecting concerns about national economies, national security, or citizenship. At the same time, in discourses of cybersecurity, constructions of 'viruses' or 'pirates' as threats to nation states are often deeply gendered and racialized, raising questions about the larger conditions which shape configurations of cybersecurity practices, technologies, and regulations.

The aim of this session is to explore cybersecurity as it configures and touches upon intersecting issues of national (in)security, national economy, or citizenship. We particularly welcome feminist, critical race, and post-colonial perspectives on cybersecurity, including the role of bodies, identities, and labors in implementation, targets and outcomes. We also welcome perspectives on the 'invisible work' involved in infrastructure maintenance and repair, as well as perspectives on failures, breakdowns, and how these are exploited by marginalized groups.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 2 September, 2016, -