ICA Preconference: Justice and Order in a Datafied Society

Organizers: NICK COULDRY, LSE, UK; LINA DENCIK, DATA JUSTICE LAB, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, UK; ANDREAS HEPP, ZEMKI, BREMEN, GERMANY; KARIN VAN ES, UTRECHT DATA SCHOOL, UTRECHT, HOLLAND with support of Pat Aufderheide, American U, DC

Contact: n.couldry@lse.ac.uk; dencikl@cardiff.ac.uk; ahepp@uni-bremen.de; K.F.vanEs@uu.nl

Division/Interest Group Affiliation(s): Communication and Technology Division and Philosophy Theory and Critique Division

Description: The growth of automated data collection, processing and analysis, and its installation within contemporary social, economic and political orders has created a number of huge challenges: for protecting fundamental rights and values such as freedom and autonomy, for understanding the connections between communications and social order, for sustaining key institutional processes such as the law, and for maintaining the very legitimacy and authority of decision-making by legal, political and social institutions. At the core of these challenges is a more basic question: what happens to society when communications (in the novel form of datafication and, underlying that, automated symbolic categorizations within database structures) begin to play a historically new role in the organization of life? This question requires communication researchers to be in dialogue with researchers in law and policy to address this fundamental question of communication beyond borders. Specific topics to be addressed include:1. What ethical, legal and normative concepts are most helpful in building appropriate regulatory frameworks that manage the consequences of datafication? 2. How can we best theorise how economic legal and social institutions are being transformed by datafication?3. What forms of social order and social governance are emerging through datafication and algorithmic processes, and are they consistent with existing democratic models of social governance? What if they are not consistent?4. What are the specific implications of datafication processes for the authority of legal institutions and processes of legal decision-making?5. What can be learned, and what, if anything, must be unlearned from the European GDPR and EU legal proceedings against the abuse of market power by large technology companies? 6. What distinctive perspectives does the Global South on data and datafication and how can those perspectives be effectively integrated into discussions in the Global North?7. Generally, what are the common agendas and common questions that need to be formulated so that scholars in the fields of communications and law (and, more broadly, management and society) can come together around transdisciplinary solutions to the problematic implications of the datafied society?8. What practical resources and pathways are needed to help the voices of critical researchers in this area be heard better and more widely?Committed speakers so far are: Keynotes: Julie Cohen, Georgetown School of Law, author of Configuring the Networked Self and (forthcoming) Between Truth and Power; Mark Andrejevic, Monash University, Melbourne and author of Infoglut (2013) and iSpy (2007).Panel speakers: [communications] Payal Arora, Erasmus, Rotterdam; Alison Hearn, Western Ontario; Anna Lauren Hoffman, U of Washington; Thomas Poell, U of Amsterdam; Joseph Turow, UPenn[law] Ellen Goodman, Rutgers; Natali Helberger, U of Amsterdam; Frank Pasquale, U of Maryland; Andrew Selbst, Data and Society, New York; Wolfgang Schulz, Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg.