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An International Symposium

Revealing Privacy: Debating Understandings of Privacy

Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Helsinki, 19th-20th May 2011

Privacy is not a new issue but it remains an enduringly problematic one. In the contemporary world the new means of communication, and the new democratisation of information flows through blogging, twitter, and social networks, have added a distinctive and radical shift to concerns with the boundaries of privacy; and its protection. The legal system has historically played a central role in the definition of privacy and its policing. Internationally we can see that different national legal frameworks for the protection of privacy have implications for its maintenance as differing state systems, and their attendant political discourses, frame the understanding of, and protection of, the right to privacy. States and commercial enterprises, for example, increasingly have the capacity and intent to monitor a wide range of our behaviours, from health and mobility, to purchasing habits and internet behaviour. At the same time urban planning is prepared to shape our physical environment in terms of seeking to exclude some citizens and facilitate the participation of others in the interests of a mix of commercial and security rationales: increasingly the public space is being privatised.

At the same time philosophy and the social psychology have engaged in an interrogation of the foundational bases of privacy and its relationship to the construction of the self. These issues remain central to our capacity to enter into any practical concern with the current experience of negotiating privacy in a personal and political space: particularly as both history and cultural studies have demonstrated the dramatic malleability of the experience and expression of privacy within a specific socio-historical context. In the contemporary world, for example, the securitisation of banal daily life is but one of the forces transforming the social, political and legal context within which privacy is negotiated.

Historical and gender studies too have analysed the issue of privacy within the framework of  the domestic sphere and women’s experience, with particular attention to early modern society, where the separation of spheres created female segregated social settings in opposition to male productive political spaces.  Privacy and domesticity become thus two related terms but they are not necessarily interchangeable: in the Graeco-Roman society, for example, the elite house was a locus of public life and the stage for the male house-owner’s performance of the rituals of social life. Yet the ancient elite class could still afford the luxury of privacy, though in a different dimension from the one enjoyed in our contemporary society.  In antiquity as well as today, social status and class affect both the uses and gendering of the phenomenon of privacy.

It is with this interdisciplinary connectivity in mind that we wish to hold a symposium where the intersection of these different insights into the nature of privacy may be explored.

For more information, please email the organisers:

Margherita Carucci (margherita.carucci@helsinki.fi)
Charles Husband (charles.husband@helsinki.fi)
Kirsi Reyes (kirsi.reyes@helsinki.fi)