The Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network for Cybersecurity and Society (LINCS) invites paper and/or panel proposals for its second annual conference to be held on the 25th of May at Queen’s University Belfast. 

The conference aims to critically interrogate the impact of technology and its ever increasing role in the interplay between societal developments and political processes. In particular, we invite contributions from Ph.D. candidates and early career researchers whose work engages with, but is not limited to, the following broad themes:

• What societal challenges, as well as opportunities, emerge from the coupling of modernity and technology?
• How do technological developments affect social and political life, and how are they in turn similarly affected?
• How does technology enable and/or constrain the emergence of new forms of control and governance?
• How does the analytical focus on technology problematize traditional understandings of power, accountability, subjectivity and citizenship?
• How can we identify, analyse and critically account for technology’s socio-political and legal implications?
• How are current legal frameworks affected by technological developments, and what is the role of law in making technology accountable to democratic values?
• What political processes and practices can bring technology into democracy?

We encourage participants to reflect upon these questions through the lens of their own work and researcher agendas. If you feel that your current research fits with the aims of the conference, but cannot be specifically categorised under the above themes, you are more than welcome to submit an abstract or contact us.

If you are interested in participating, please send a tentative title, affiliation, and abstract of your contribution to Georgios Glouftsios (gglouftsios01@qub.ac.uk) or Adam Harkens (aharkens01@qub.ac.uk) by the 17th of April. Participants will be contacted on the 21st of April. Please note that abstracts should not exceed 300 words. Unfortunately, we are unable to cover travel and accommodation costs. If you are not based in Northern Ireland, please do not hesitate to contact Adam Harkens (aharkens01@qub.ac.uk) for any advice or help on travel and accommodation arrangements.

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker will be Professor Rob Kitchin from Maynooth University. Rob is presently an ERC Advanced Investigator and PI of the Programmable City project. He is editor of the international journals Progress in Human Geography and Dialogues in Human Geography, and for eleven years was the editor of Social and Cultural Geography.

After completing a PhD on the cognition of geographic space, Rob became interested in social geography, the geographies of technology, cartography, the communication of geographic scholarship more broadly, and the development of data infrastructures, and he continues to research and publish on these themes. His book ‘Code/Space’ (with Martin Dodge) won the Association of American Geographers ‘Meridian Book Award’ for the outstanding book in the discipline in 2011 and a ‘CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2011′ award from the American Library Association. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.

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