CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC) 2021
The Program Committee of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference invites submission of abstracts for the 14th annual conference (PLSC 2021) to be held virtually on Thursday and Friday, June 3 and 4, 2021.
What is PLSC?
PLSC is a paper workshop conference. It offers no opportunity or obligation to publish. The goal is to provide support for in-progress scholarship related to information privacy law. To do so, PLSC assembles a wide array of privacy law scholars and practitioners who engage in scholarship. Scholars from non-law disciplines—including but not limited to surveillance studies, technology studies, feminist and queer studies, information studies, critical race studies, social sciences, humanities, and computer science—are critical participants in this interdisciplinary field.
We follow a format in which a discussant, rather than the author, introduces and leads a discussion on a paper. There are no panels or talking heads; attendees read papers in advance and offer constructive feedback as full participants in the workshop. More information on how to register for and attend the conference will be forthcoming soon. Having your paper accepted is NOT a requirement for attending and contributing to the conference, and indeed many attendees do not present a paper. Nor does submitting an abstract register you for the conference–we have a separate process for registration.
What do we mean by “Privacy”?
The boundaries of privacy as a discipline are dynamic and contested. As such, we take a broad view. Although PLSC emphasizes the law of privacy, concepts from other fields play critical roles in our understanding of privacy and in shaping the law. For example, the following topics have received significant attention at previous PLSCs: the concept of “cyber civil rights”, algorithmic governance and discrimination, police practices such as predictive policing and new surveillance technologies, political/social/cultural dimensions of data-intensive technologies, and privacy’s unique importance to marginalized populations, among many more.
Both in the substance of scholarship and in the governance of the PLSC, we are committed to building an anti-racist and anti-subordination scholarly community around privacy law. We are dedicated to incubating scholarship that examines the intersections of technology, law, and policy and its ability to dismantle–or entrench–social hierarchies of all kinds.
How do we select abstracts for PLSC?
To expand our scholarly community, we are moving to an open format where not only is the call for papers/abstracts open to all, but any academic can attend/register without an invitation. Practitioners engaged in scholarship will be welcomed if space permits. To further the inclusive nature of the conference, the Program Committee’s review of abstracts will be blind (that is, authors will be anonymous). We use title and institution for attribution and management purposes. The Program Committee only receives your abstract and conflicts statements, and conducts a blind review process.
How to submit an abstract?
If you would like to workshop a paper, please fill out the form below, and provide the following: your name and contact information (and that of all co-authors), the project’s title, and an abstract of 500-700 words (excluding citations) that grounds your work in the relevant scholarly literature. There is no option to upload papers or materials; please include all necessary information about your project in the text box for abstracts. Abstracts should situate your project within the long tradition of interdisciplinary privacy scholarship in a manner that is sufficient for the members of the Program Committee to appreciate both the genesis of your project and its contribution to the field. Much of privacy law scholarship spans scholarly literatures, bridges silos, and brings insights from diverse perspectives. We welcome abstracts that do so. Please note that the amount of detail provided in the typical law review abstract will generally be insufficient for this purpose.
Key dates:
Abstracts due: January 29, 2021 by 5 PM Eastern time, no exceptions
Notification of acceptance: No later than February 26, 2021
Full workshop paper drafts due: May 3, 2021, no exceptions
What if my research is sponsored or funded?
In many disciplines, research is funded by grants. Any funding and sponsorship must be disclosed, and there is a space in the abstract submission portal to do so. We will not accept papers that are subject to pre-publication review/veto by a sponsor, or those where the sponsor controls the content of the paper. We require a conflicts of interest statement on scholarship. Our full statement on corporate sponsorship is available here.
Please email info@privacyscholars.org if there are any questions or concerns.
Abstract Submission Form
Thank you for your interest in providing an abstract for review. The window for submissions is now closed.