Histories of Tracking Conference
Université de Luxembourg | Universität Siegen
September 30 – October 2, 2026
Location: Black Box, MSH, Belval Campus, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
https://www.uni.lu/c2dh-en/events/histories-of-tracking
Surveillance has become ubiquitous in digital media environments and is now taken for granted. With every PayPal interaction, at the least more than 600 trackers eavesdrop on its transactional data (Schneier 2018). While there is no lack of critique on digital surveillance and its discontents, its ubiquity and naturalization itself require more explanation. Which historical and economical trajectories have led into the current escalation of digital tracking, tracing, monitoring, classification, intelligence service, and advertising? How can we discover and mobilize counterpoints and narratives that explain digital surveillance otherwise? Do micro-level media, data, and sensor practices represent “yet another mutation of capitalism,” to quote from Gilles Deleuze’s famous Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)?
Tracking persons, emotions, objects, apparatuses, money, signs and data is a veritable environing technique. It is also one of the key business applications of platform and data economies, which provide for the infrastructures of state-side institutional surveillance and control. With our joint Luxembourg-Siegen conference on Histories of Tracking we aim to track the trackers historiographically, technologically, and ecologically.
In a seminal text, Phil Agre (2003 [1994]) has encouraged us to think about the difference between rather centralized regimes of (visual) surveillance and data-based institutional regimes of “capture.” Agre has paved the way for a logistical theory of digital surveillance that investigates its micropolitics. While non-visual alphanumeric modes of capturing data do not feel like surveillance, they nonetheless establish an ever more mundane and affective mode of ubiquitous surveillance. What if we follow Agre’s analysis of institutional “grammars of action” that afford a whole spectrum of capturing, monitoring, sensing, and surveillant practices? Histories of tracking, we assume, are histories of the institutions, corporations, and agencies that create the tapestry of surveillance (Lauer 2017). That tapestry might seem all-encompassing and seamless by now, even if it contains loose threads, loopholes, and islands of encryption.
Histories of tracking are co-operative histories that involve the consent, non-consent and dissent of digital media usage (Jones 2024). They are also business histories that rely on what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has aptly called a “behavioral surplus” of data. Last but not least, histories of tracking are histories of its public scrutiny and accountability, from opposing civil rights movements to the political and legal controversies that make the case for regulation.
We thus invited dedicated contributions from Media and Cultural Studies, History, Science and Technology Studies, Surveillance Studies, Platform Studies, Code Studies, Socio-Informatics, Law, and Sociology that combine historiographic and empirical work with grounded theoretical approaches.
Wednesday 30th September 2026
15.00 Welcoming Note by the Organizers
15.30-16.30 Keynote
Matthew L. Jones (Smith Family Professor of History, Princeton University)
Metadata and the “cryptographic revolution,” from the order of battle to the war on terror
Chair: Sebastian Giessmann (University of Siegen)
16.30-17.00 Break
17.00-18.45 Panel | History at Work: Surveillance, Data and Resistance
Chair: Vy Cao (C2DH)
Surveillance in a Pre-Computer Age: On the Beginnings of Managerial Practices in the Interwar Period, by Anne Schreiber (University of Siegen)
The Civil History of Biometric Computers: Linking the 1960s African Independences to the Rise of Western Security Infrastructure, by Cecilia Passanti (Université Paris Cité)
Captured by Capture: Data Fantasies, Indicator Failure, and Vietnamese Resistance to US Population Tracking, by Moritz Feichtinger (University of Basel)
18.45 Dinner
Thursday 1st October
10.00-11.15 Panel | Rules of the Game: Capture and Protocol between Culture and Infrastructure
Chair: Stefan Krebs (C2DH)
Playing the Field: From Surveillance to Socialized Capture in Dniprov’s “Igra”, by Benjamin Peters (University of Tulsa) and Ksenia Tatarchenko (Johns Hopkins University)
Moves and counter-moves in IETF RFCs about user surveillance, by Stéphane Bortzmeyer (Afnic)
11.15-11.30 Break
11.30-12.45 Roundtable | Advertising Technologies: Histories, Infrastructures, Controversies organized and moderated by Tatjana Seitz, University of Siegen
With Wolfie Christl (Cracked Labs) and Rebecca Ciesielski (Bayerischer Rundfunk)
12.45-14.45 Lunch (and Blast Furnaces Tour 1h30)
14.45-16.00 Panel | Watching Creatures: Media Histories of Non-Human Tracking
Chair: Inga Schuppener (University of Siegen)
Unwilling Users: Animals, Capture, and the Media History of Wildlife Tracking, by Christoph Borbach (University of Siegen)
Track to Steer: Automated Surveillance and Mobile Intervention in Pasture Management, by Kathrin Friedrich and Vesna Schierbaum (University of Potsdam)
16.00-16.30 Break
16.30-17.30 Keynote by Michelle Spektor (MIT Schwarzman College of Computing)
Tracking the past, present, and future of the global surveillance society
Chair: Machteld Venken (C2DH)
17.30-18.15 Dialogue with Clio van Aerde, artist in residence at C2DH
Chair: Finola Finn (C2DH)
Friday 2nd October
9.30-10.45 Panel | Situated Data: Witnessing, Identity, and the Ethics of Tracking in the Field
Chair: Valérie Schafer (C2DH)
War Witnessing: Critical Data Practices and Inventive Witnessing, by Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina)
From Devices to Persons: Identity Resolution in Digital Tracking Infrastructures, by Yarden Skop (University of Siegen) and Marcus Burkhardt (University of Paderborn)
Doing research when walls have ears: surveillance symbiosis and material grammars of tracking in the Rif, Morocco, by Nina Ter Laan (University of Cologne)
10.45-11.00 Break
11.00-12.00 Keynote by Prof. Azadeh Akbari (Professor of Critical Data & Technology Studies, Centre for Critical Computational Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt)
Fabricated Histories: Tracking Them to the Stone Age
Chair: Thomas Cauvin (C2DH)
12.00-12.30 Closing remarks
Lunch
Scientific Committee: Sebastian Giessmann, Valérie Schafer, Tatjana Seitz, Anne Schreiber, Inga Schuppener
With the support of CRC Media of Cooperation, Siegen; project A01: Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization; C2DH, Université de Luxembourg; FNR, Luxembourg and DFG, Germany
References
Agre, Philip E. “Surveillance and Capture. Two Models of Privacy.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. MIT Press, 2003 [1994].
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7.
Jones, Meg Leta. The Character of Consent. The History of Cookies and the Future of Technology Policy. Information Policy. MIT Press, 2024.
Lauer, Josh. Creditworthy. A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. Columbia University Press, 2017.
Schneier, Bruce. “The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With – Schneier on Security.” Schneier on Security, March 14, 2018. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/the_600_compani.html.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2019.