Past Privacy Today: Negotiating Boundaries – Navigating Challenges

Image illustrating privacy in the past and in the present


3-4 September 2026

Needs for privacy emerge when boundaries are negotiated between individuals, communities, and societies. In such encounters, the large-scale structures of public space are challenged by the small-scale needs, desires, and wishes of individuals and smaller social groups.

How do such social dynamics play out across different contexts across the globe, both in the past and present?

How do changes in institutional structures influence privacy, and the other way around?

What forms of privacy were safeguarded or suppressed?

Who has been entitled to privacy, and under what circumstances? 

How does privacy relate to other concepts such as intimacy, secrecy, confidentiality, and anonymity?

And how should we as historians and contemporary privacy scholars navigate the boundaries between them?

This conference aims to address these and similar questions through thematic panels, inviting speakers and audience to interdisciplinary explorations. Building upon the insights produced at the Centre for Privacy Studies (2017-2027), it is our goal that these discussions will spark a flourishing stream of new scholarship in the field of privacy studies.