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Current News
Items of interest having to do with the general research-areas of The Electro-Governance Group (Also see The EGG on Twitter ).

Other Events
Events of interest having to do with the general research-areas of The Electro-Governance Group (Online, Offline, On-Campus, Off-Campus, etc.). 

Speaker Series
Lectures presented and/or sponsored by The Electro-Governance Group at Western.

Past News & Events

Dr. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy has published a new article in the international peer-reviewed journal Digital War discussing the expansion of global full-spectrum warfare. In ‘Fuller Spectrum Operations: The Emergence of Larval Warfare’, she argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a distinct construct of digital warfare that exploits non-military weapons and conceptually depends on blurring the strict boundaries between military and civilian domains. Read the full article here.

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Call for Papers: 4S Conference, Seattle 2025
The Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the Electro-Governance Group at Western University jointly seek contributions for its open panel, "Masked Conflicts and Cognitive Defenses: Rethinking Security in the Age of Information Disorder" at the 50th 4S Conference in Seattle this September.

Elections have become focal points for public and academic discussions about propaganda, influence, deception, and manipulation in the information environment. These often blur worries about hostile information warfare with general concerns about media and informational dysfunctions. This trans-disciplinary panel explores connections between these two concerns, and conceptions of informational health and security that underlie them.

Our view of ourselves and each other increasingly mediated by opaque sociotechnical systems that shape and structure our sensemaking, and are vulnerable to exploitation. Concerns about cognitive and information warfare waged by adversaries reveal information environments as sites of conflict, exploited by propaganda and information operations, and the co-option of citizens in "participatory disinformation" (Kate Starbird 2019).

These are examples of an emergent form of conflict, distinct from conventional and unconventional use of force, which Nandita Biswas Mellamphy calls "larval warfare" (2025) from the Latin 'masked. This erodes and destabilizes boundaries between combatant and non-combatant, and domestic and foreign actors. War with the adversary becomes war with ourselves. Cognitive security has arisen as a framework for democracies to counter informational and cognitive threats and build societal resilience. However, this is difficult to articulate within narrow vocabularies of security discourse (often in the dialect of national and cyber security) without running into deep tensions with legal norms, with basic democratic ideals, and with the social and institutional preconditions of our social-epistemic interdependence.

This panel engages scholars from humanities, social sciences, and media studies to examine the emergence of larval warfare in relation to ideas of informational, epistemic and cognitive security. What kind of security can this be, for whom, and what conditions foster it? Engagement with these questions is essential if we want to formulate and enact defensive policies that can be effective, non-partisan, and avoid collateral damage to epistemic, social, and political goods.

Deadline: 31 January 2025

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Upcoming talk: 'The State of AI and Why Canada Should Not Buy the Hype'
Thursday January 23, 2025, 4-5:30PM,
Room 115, Weldon Library Learning Commons
https://starlingcentre.ca/event/paris-marx-at-western/

Society for Social Studies of Science
Call for Open Panels for the 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) 2025 conference Reverberations, to be held at the Sheraton Hotel in Seattle from September 3-7, 2025. The theme offers layered meaning, sitting at the nexus of transmission and repercussion, and across multiple sightlines and frequencies—historical, geological, sonic, and otherwise. Please submit your open panel proposals by November 15th, 2024.
https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_open_panels_seattle.php

Launch: Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies at Western University
Wednesday, October 2 · 4 – 8pm EDT
Thursday, October 3 · 9am – 4:30pm EDT
Museum London 421 Ridout Street North London, ON N6A 5H4 Canada
https://starlingcentre.ca/event/launch-of-the-starling-centre-for-just-technologies-and-just-societies/

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Artificial | Natural: AI & Environmental History
October 7, 2024
Weldon Library Community Room 128. Western University
https://niche-canada.org/2024/09/10/events-artificial-natural-ai-environmental-history/

Cosmic Brains, Synthetic Minds Symposium and Public Performances
November 21-25, 2023
Medialab Matadero, Madrid, Spain

https://www.mataderomadrid.org/en/schedule/cosmic-brains-public-symposium-and-performance
https://www.mataderomadrid.org/en/schedule/cosmic-brains

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Essay Competition for Graduate Students and Post-Docs in Terrorism and Technology- $1000 prize and opportunity to present and publish work (deadline December 2020) https://www.nextgen50.org/essay-competition

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The Electro-Governance Group (EGG) welcomes its 2020-2021 Junior Research Fellow, Anne Campbell. Anne is a fourth year Political Science (Honours) student at Western University focusing on post-9/11 international security, cybersecurity, and gender. She has worked extensively in research, policy and human rights at the Senate of Canada and with the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders. Currently, Anne is researching the impacts of COVID-19 on international and domestic security and is looking forward to working closely with members of the EGG in order to explore the socio-political implications of technological change, international security, and gender.