Proceedings and videos for the SSSCLA'09

It’s a pleasure to announce that the Proceedings for the SSSCLA are out and available for free at http://www2.pucpr.br/ssscla. The videos for the 4 keynote talks are available from the same address. Please feel free to visit and to distribute.

I apologize for the enormous delay in releasing the proceedings but the editing work was all down to only one person. It was more than 600 pages to review, return to authors and reformat.

I must thank everyone for their collaboration. Soon we will get back to you with more information on the next event in Mexico, 2010.

The initiative of organizing the interdisciplinary symposium Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America, which took place in Curitiba, PR, Brazil, between 4th and 6th March 2009, stemmed from a common collective idea through different perspective and approaches: the need for prospection, gathering, mobilization and communication of Latin-American works and researchers dedicated to issues related to surveillance studies.

There is no record of events of this kind sharing the same focus in Latin America. Thus, the expectation of the organizers and scholars involved with this event is that it has become the first of a series of other symposiums to take place in many other Latin-American cities, with the aim of gathering more and more scholars, research and approaches related to surveillance, especially from the point of view of a knowledge construction and diffusion in the so-called global South. In fact, the first motivations raised for the organization of this event, called attention to a possible separation of knowledge and research about surveillance between the global South and the global North.

Besides the papers, we had the important contributions as keynote speakers from renowned scholars in the fields that surround surveillance studies. Thus, we had the crucial talks by Professor David Lyon (Queen’s University, Canada), Professor Luis Antonio Machado da Silva (Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Professor Nelson Arteaga Botello (Universidad Autonoma del Estado do Mexico) and Professor David Murakami Wood (Newcastle University). Videos featuring their keynote speeches are attached to these proceedings and available online at: http://www2.pucpr.br/ssscla/videos.htm.

We express our gratitude to the institutions that made this symposium a reality, being: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR); Programa de Pós-Graduação em Gestão Urbana (PPGTU-PUCPR); curso de especialização Gestão Técnica do Meio Urbano (GTU-PUCPR); Fundação Araucária; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação e Cultura (EcoPós-UFRJ); Surveillance Studies Network; and the journal Surveillance & Society.