Final conference: Algorithmic Governance & Cultures of Policing

This is the final conference of the research project 'Algorithmic Governance and Cultures of Policing: Comparative Perspectives from Norway, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa' (AGOPOL).

Presenting some of the key results, we will also outline new perspectives on algorithmic governance, predictive and pre-emptive modes of policing, the pluralization and privatization of policing, and the effects of algorithmic governance as a form of management on police as an organization, which have emerged from this project – drawing on ethnographies and qualitative research from across the globe.

In this final AGOPOL conference, we will present 3 published monographs and our forthcoming joint edited volume, which are some (but far from all) results from this project. In the evening, we also invite you to the screening of two films made by our researchers, both focusing on Brazil.

Join us for the engaging book launches, panel discussions with authors, teaser of our forthcoming edited volume comprising a series of short presentations by authors and film screenings!

We hope to see you on the 18th of March and do not forget to register!

Go to registration

Program

18th March 2024
10:00–17:00
Professorboligen, Karl Johans gate 47, Oslo, Norway

Film screenings

19:30–22:00
Auditorium 2, Domus Juridica
Kristian Augusts gate 17, 0164 Oslo, Norway

Smile, you are being recorded!

Direction: Maria Rita Nepomuceno
Script and research: Maria Rita Nepomuceno and Paulo Cruz Terra
Length: 35 min
Funded by: The Research Council of Norway (313626): Algorithmic Governance and Cultures of Policing: Comparative Perspectives from Norway, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa (AGOPOL)

Facial recognition technology has spread very rapidly in the field of public security in Brazilian cities in recent years. The film addresses the perspective of civil society and the mobilization to ban this technology – an apparatus of the security forces. Through the researcher Paulo Terra, we meet activists involved in the civil society organization initiative ‘Get my face out of your sight,’ and we are invited to think about the relationship between this technology and other forms of surveillance in Brazil’s history. What has facial recognition technology brought to policing? What does it have to do with the country’s past? What are the new challenges for activists?

Jingles as Affective Politics in Brazil’s 2022 Election

Directed and produced by: Kjetil Klette Bøhler, João Neves, Gabi Perissinotto, Marcel DaVelha
Length: 45 min
Funded by: The Research Council of Norway (313626): Algorithmic Governance and Cultures of Policing: Comparative Perspectives from Norway, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa (AGOPOL)

Jingles as Affective Politics in Brazil’s 2022 Election explores how political candidates used jingles to recruit voters in Brazil’s 2022 election. The film has a particular focus on Bolsonaro and Lula’s use of jingles, and how music created political awareness and affective mobilization among voter groups. It features in-depth interviews with influential jingle producers such as Hilton Acioli and Juliano Maderada, as well as with scholars working in the field of music and politics in Brazil. It also contains interviews with voters and volunteers that worked for different political campaigns. The film draws on material gathered throughout the 2022 election campaign, including film of political events, movements, street protests and other political events.

About the books

Compliance-Industrial Complex: The Operating System of a Pre-Crime Society

by Tereza Østbø Kuldova

This is the first book to examine the growth and phenomenon of a securitized and criminalized compliance which relies increasingly on intelligence-led and predictive technologies to control future risks, crimes, and security threats. It articulates the emergence of a ‘compliance-industrial complex’ that synthesizes regulatory capitalism and surveillance capitalism to impose new regimes of power and control, as well as new forms of subjectivity subservient to the ‘operating system’ of a pre-crime society. Looking at compliance beyond frameworks of business management, corporate governance, law, and accounting, it looks as it as a social phenomenon, instrumental in the pluralization and privatization of policing, where the private intelligence, private security, and big tech companies are being concentrated at the very core of compliance, and hence, governance of the social. This critical work draws on transversal, rather than interdisciplinary, approaches and integrates disparate perspectives, inspired by works in critical criminology, critical algorithm studies, critical management studies, as well as social anthropology and philosophy.

‘It's often been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Kuldova's cutting-edge research into what she calls the ‘compliance-industrial complex’ reveals in fine detail how new hi-tech systems of algorithmic information gathering and social management, while claiming to make the world a safer and better place, are dehumanising our everyday lives, displacing democratic politics, threatening hard-won freedoms and pushing us along that very road at an increasing pace. Very few academic research monographs can be legitimately described as ‘page-turners’, but this is one of them.’

– Professor Steve Hall, author of Theorizing Crime and Deviance

Predictive Policing and The Construction of The 'Criminal': An Ethnographic Study of Delhi Police

by Shivangi Narayan

This book provides a cultural investigation of the police in India and how it uses data and algorithmic tools for crime mapping. The book draws on an ethnographic study of Delhi Police's hotspot mapping endeavour. It provides a sociological investigation of the police in India and how they use data and algorithmic tools for crime mapping. It discusses how ‘criminals’ are constructed in these systems, typically, the marginalised residents of slums and immigrant colonies. It explores how the algorithm reifies existing assumptions and prejudices about 'criminals' as artificial intelligence systems are deeply intertwined with the culture and beliefs of those who make and use them. It pays special attention to the discriminatory practices of relevant police officers and how this ‘predictive’ policing perpetuates harm to the most marginalised. This book contributes to discussions around big data and surveillance studies broadly.

Policing in Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and the Far-Right

by Tomas Salem

This book offers a unique look into the world of policing and the frontline of Brazil’s war on drugs. It analyzes the tensions produced by attempts to modernize Rio de Janeiro’s public security policies. Since the return of democracy in 1985, Rio's police forces have waged war against armed drug gangs based in the city’s favelas, casting the people who live in these communities as internal enemies. In preparation for the Olympics in 2016, the police sought to ‘pacify’ the favelas and their populations through the establishment of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) in many of the city’s favela communities. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with the police, this book follows officers across the institutional hierarchy in their daily activities, on patrol, and during training. Tracing the genealogies of contemporary forms of policing-as-warfare through the notion of ‘colonial war’ and ‘cultural war’, it highlights the material and ideational dimensions of war as a cosmological force that shapes Brazilian social relations, subjectivities, landscapes, economies, and politics. It draws on the Deleuzian notion of ‘war machine and state dynamics’ to show how practices of elimination co-exist with attempts to transform favela territories and their people and analyzes the link between the moral universe of policing and right-wing populism in Brazil. Through rich and nuanced ethnography, it offers a critical perspective on militarized policing and 21st century forms of authoritarianism.

Practical information

This is an onsite conference and the conference takes place at the University of Oslo. The language of the conference is English.

Location for the conference: The Faculty of Law, Professorboligen

Location for the film screening: Auditorium 2, Domus Juridica

Financing

This conference is part of the project 'Algorithmic Governance and Cultures of Policing: Comparative Perspectives from Norway, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa' (AGOPOL), funded by The Research Council of Norway (313626).

Conference organizers

• Tereza Østbø Kuldova, Oslo Metropolitan University
• Helene Oppen Ingebrigtsen Gundhus, University of Oslo
• Christin Thea Wathne, Oslo Metropolitan University