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Through an array of technological solutions and awareness-raising initiatives, civil society mobilizes against an onslaught of surveillance threats. What alternative values, practices, and tactics emerge from the grassroots which point toward other ways of being in the datafied society? Conversing with critical data studies, science and technology studies, and surveillance studies, this article looks at how dominant imaginaries of datafication are reconfigured and responded to by groups of people dealing directly with their harms and risks. Building on practitioner interviews and participant observation in digital rights events and surveying projects intervening in three critical technological issues of our time—the challenges of digitally secure computing, the Internet of Things, and the threat of widespread facial recognition—this article investigates social justice activists, human rights defenders, and progressive technologists as they try to flip dominant algorithmic imaginaries. In so doing, the article contributes to our understanding of how individuals and social groups make sense of the challenges of datafication from the bottom-up.

AbstractThe Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum's inspiration was a roundtable discussion at the 2017 International Studies Association Annual Convention, where many of the forum authors agreed on the need for critical debate about the effects of online surveillance and censorship techniques on scholarship. This forum contains five critiques regarding our digitized infrastructures, datafied institutions, mercenary corporations, exploitative academic platforms, and insecure online practices. Together, this unique collection of articles contributes to the research on academic freedom and helps to frame the analysis of the neoliberal higher education sector, the surveillance practices that students and staff encounter, and the growing necessity to improve our "digital hygiene."