The Private is Political
Also, this is the LAST CALL to join CITAP as an affiliate for 2023-24!
🎉👏 We’re celebrating the publication of Alice Marwick’s The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media this week.
We commonly think about privacy as an individual concept and privacy work as an individual responsibility. This false framing leaves us all worse off: as Alice writes in the book, “our networks are only as safe as our chattiest contact, and our cultures, social groups, and families of origin have norms around information sharing that may not match our own.”
What’s more, the harms of privacy violations aren’t equally distributed and fall more heavily on already-marginalized groups. From a history of privacy and surveillance to in-depth studies of the privacy practices of low-income, LGBTQ+, people who have experienced online harassment, and college students, the book explores how understanding privacy as a networked concept and addressing it with structural changes benefits us all.
We need a theory of privacy that is suitable for this landscape, not one formulated for an era of photography, newspapers, and telephones. Overwhelmingly, in the United States, online privacy is framed as a matter of individual responsibility…despite this assignment of responsibility, most online privacy violations are virtually impossible for an individual to avoid.
-Alice Marwick, The Private Is Political
The Private Is Political explores the concept of networked privacy and how understanding big data aggregation and social media point to better privacy protections for us all, from centering the needs of the most vulnerable in security design to legislative reform governing how data can be transferred across contexts.
🚨 FINAL CALL: Join CITAP as a 2023-24 affiliate
Want to be part of the CITAP affiliate community for the 2023-24 academic year? We’d love to have you! We welcome researchers whose subject matter and normative commitments align with our own. The affiliate community is open to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and professional researchers across a broad range of institutions, especially within North Carolina.
For this coming year, we have three goals for our affiliate program:
Promoting public scholarship and research translation efforts that help policymakers, civil society groups, and others better understand the impact of technology on our public lives.
Supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career researchers navigating the challenges of doing interdisciplinary and publicly-engaged work.
Providing a community for researchers who could benefit from a broader network.
These goals inform our affiliate programming and are not intended to limit who should apply! (We also welcome well-connected senior researchers interested in sharing their time and talents, for example).
Open calls
Summer only just started, but fall conferences are already coming together. We’ve got two CFPs to share for October gatherings you probably want to join:
October 16: CITAP will host a one-day symposium on Misinformation and Marginalization. Proposals due by June 30.
October 22: Deen Freelon is co-organizing The Post-API Conference: Social media data acquisition after Twitter. Proposals due by July 17.
Publications and appearances
This week the UNC Royster Society of Fellows hosted its annual global conference. Affiliate Heesoo Jang discussed her research on South Korea’s Nth Room digital sex trafficking case and how technology platforms afford abuse and exploitation, and affiliate Aashka Dave led a panel discussion on exercising power and agency as graduate students.
Coming soon
June 5: Deadline to apply to join the CITAP 2023-24 affiliate community.
June 30: Proposals due for the Misinformation and Marginalization Symposium at CITAP.