EUROPEAN GROUP FOR THE STUDY OF DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL 50th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
Campus Luigi Einaudi. Torino, Italy, 7-9 September 2022
http://www.european-group.org/2022/02/25/eg-50th-annual-conference/
Over the past decades, capitalism has undergone transformations that have posed radical challenges for critical thinking. From the harms of ‘old’ capitalism to its most recent transformations, the world is experiencing new forms of exploitation, contradictions and challenges. Political movements around ethical consumption and green capitalism increasingly overshadow the fundamental problems at the heart of corporate capital: exploitation of human and natural resources, inequality and state-corporate expansionism.
Undoubtedly, one of the most pressing contemporary issues is the rise of surveillance capitalism, which increasingly invades our daily lives and shapes our subjectivities (individually and collectively). The transformations of new surveillance capitalism are affecting people intersectionally, relating to class, religion, race, gender, economic status, educational attainment, and countries where people live. Our choices and decisions (from what we eat to whom we date), risk creating new and effective tools for further exploitation and social control. This is particularly true for the ways we communicate, move and experience in, such as the ‘smart city’ and ‘smart-university’.
While the world is experiencing the exacerbation and renewal of disparities, contradictions and shades of authoritarianism, the ongoing pandemic has drastically exposed the irresponsibility of decades of austerity, commercialisation, and under-funding of social care systems. The tensions underpinning the transformations of capitalism and their impact on society have been even more evident making the need for rethinking justice crucial for academics, activists and practitioners.
In addition, the persistent processes of privatisation and the role played by corporates in the management of criminal justice (including the military and prison industrial complex, Artificial Intelligence, electronic surveillance, smart policing, border control technologies, actuarial justice) has radically modified the idea of justice, social inclusion and punishment as a prerogative of the state. In this scenario, on one side new tools and dispositive of criminalisation and social exclusion are developed by the criminal justice system. On the other side, state and corporate control evolve toward new domains and forms of social harm, which themselves paradoxically remain areas of deregulation and lenient social control. The development and transformation of capitalism have also promoted new and different forms of populism that have deployed nuanced criminal justice toolkits to control, repress and demonise many forms of political opposition, resistance and dissent.
unenormecampo 