Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Likewise, the ways and means through which individuals and smaller groups resist the systemic
attempt to be gazed at or reduced to objects of surveillance is of extraordinary importance, given
the ownership of global technologies in the hands of power elites. Must this resistance remain a
matter of open contestation where the gradient of power determines the outcome, or should we
raise normative questions with regard to it? The same exploration is required at the interpersonal
level as well, though the values that complicate the issue here are somewhat different. But the
question arises here as to how far we might be willing to prevent ourselves, as citizens (or in any
performative/interventional role), from entering the space occupied by others. What are those
likely situations where it becomes important to reach out to others at the risk of violating their
privacy?
Any serious question carries within it the assumption that there are possibly more answers than
one that might be in conflict with each other. Moral interfaces are ambivalent zones, and the
language used to address the exploration is bound to share the ambivalence of the reality itself.
The construction of the argument, the narrative, and the symbolism are as important as the
interface and in some sense become the interface itself. In order to appreciate the scope of the
debate and widen its parameters, we must include works from art and literature to theoretical and
conceptual frameworks cutting across genres and discourses, and the aim must be towards an
interdisciplinary, intertextual, comparative, and cross-cultural understanding of issues.
This being the broad aim of this conference, you are invited to contribute to it from the vantage
point of your discipline or field of current engagement.
The following are the broad themes/contexts that could be examined within the broad purview of
the conference proposal:
State, Citizen, Surveillance
Civil Society and Public Order
Public and Private Spheres of Influence
Public as Opposed to Private Law
Objective Condition and Subjective Imagination
Privacy in the Public Domain of Internet and Telecommunications
Depictions of Public/Private Space in Popular Culture
Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Question of Privacy
Right, Wrong and the Truth
Private Self and Public Persona
Freedom versus Responsibility
Private and Public as Socio-Political Categories
The Politics of Secrecy and Intrusiveness