{"title":"Surveillance Imaginaries: Learning from Participatory Speculative Fiction","authors":"Anna Wilson, Jen Ross","doi":"10.24908/ss.v21i3.16025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i3.16025","url":null,"abstract":"Surveillance practices have become increasingly widespread in Higher Education. Students and staff are monitored both physically and digitally, using a range of technologies and for a variety of purposes. Many technologies and systems introduced for other reasons (e.g., for resource sharing, communication, or collaborative work) offer additional surveillance capacities, either as designed-in or incidental features. These surveillance practices, whether already realised or present as possibilities, have the potential to profoundly change Higher Education both as a sector and as a process. There is thus a need for those working (and studying) in the sector to recognise and thus have the opportunity to question or resist these changes. This paper describes an attempt to use participatory speculative fiction to enable this recognition and articulation. It illustrates the power of the surveillance imaginaries that emerge from this approach to reveal deep and complex connections between surveillance, anonymity, knowledge, and power.","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135925427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Dubrofsky’s Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars","authors":"Qian Huang","doi":"10.24908/ss.v21i3.16506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i3.16506","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135926506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Automated Government Benefits and Welfare Surveillance","authors":"Mike Zajko","doi":"10.24908/ss.v21i3.16107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i3.16107","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the “digital welfare state” historically, presently, and into the future, with a focus on what artificial intelligence means for welfare surveillance. Drawing on scholarship about the development of bureaucracy, the welfare state, and automation, as well as specific examples from the Netherlands, I argue that problems posed by artificial intelligence in public administration are often misplaced or misattributed and that the societal challenges we can expect to encounter in welfare surveillance are more likely to be historically familiar than technologically novel. New technologies do provide some new capabilities, which explains the uptake of algorithmic tools in welfare fraud investigation and the use of chatbots in assisting with welfare applications. Algorithmic systems are also increasingly subject to “audits” and regulations that mandate accountability. However, many of the key issues in the automation of the welfare state are the same as identified in scholarship that long precedes the current hype around artificial intelligence. These issues include a persistent suspicion of welfare recipients to justify surveillance as a form of fraud identification, opaque decision-making, and punitive measures directed against marginalized groups, enacting harm and reproducing inequalities.","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135926516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Hong’s Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society","authors":"Anat Leshnick","doi":"10.24908/ss.v21i3.16523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i3.16523","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135926518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Far-reaching Implications of China’s AI-powered Surveillance State Post-COVID","authors":"Elise Racine","doi":"10.24908/ss.v21i3.16111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i3.16111","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic has vastly accelerated the digitalization of public health practices worldwide. In doing so, it has fostered a new class of pandemic-related technological solutions, a subset of which utilize artificial intelligence for contact tracing purposes. The People’s Republic of China has not been immune from this rush to implement these novel tools. But there is a darker element to the country’s Alipay Health Code mobile application that extends beyond pandemic preparedness. With ambitions to further incorporate the app into their already vast surveillance apparatus, China is on the precipice of setting a dangerous precedent for pervasive, state-sponsored automated social control. In such a world, we may see health tools co-opted into systems that score individuals on their political fealty. As such, they have the potential to severely undercut democratic ideals by restricting the freedom to dissent necessary to uphold such values. They would do all this under the guise of promoting collective wellbeing.","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135926172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Surveillance Studies and the History of Artificial Intelligence: A Missed Opportunity?","authors":"Aaron Gluck-Thaler","doi":"10.24908/ss.v21i3.16109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i3.16109","url":null,"abstract":"This research note considers how scholars of surveillance might approach the historical legacies that surveillance through artificial intelligence (AI) is implicated in. Engaging with the relative lack of historical studies within the pages of Surveillance & Society, the note argues that in the context of surveillant AI the stakes of an ahistorical analysis are especially high. Bridging scholarship within the history of science with surveillance studies, the note explores how AI techniques today reanimate a longer history of how scientific knowledge production on classification has been coextensive with the maintenance and production of racial, gender, and social hierarchies. The note briefly examines one genealogy––the history of the field of pattern recognition, its relationship to state surveillance, and its understanding of identification as a problem of classification––to consider how surveillance and AI contingently converged. The note concludes by showing how such histories can help scholars of surveillance critically reassess common understandings of the consequences of AI and AI-adjacent surveillance practices used today.","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135926502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Whelan and Molnar’s Securing Mega-Events: Networks, Strategies, and Tensions","authors":"J. Sheptycki","doi":"10.24908/SS.V19I1.14460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/SS.V19I1.14460","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117315363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Now We Are Struggling at Least”: Change & Continuity of Surveillance in Post-Communist Societies from the Perspective of Data Protection Authorities","authors":"Ola Svenonius, E. Tarasova","doi":"10.24908/SS.V19I1.13477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/SS.V19I1.13477","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents the results of an interview study carried out with sixteen data-protection authorities in Central and Eastern Europe. The study focuses on the way that data protection authorities reason about the past. The theoretical argument advanced in the text is that data protection in a post-communist context bears a specific historical significance due to the recent experiences with the extensive, coercive state surveillance that was systematized under the communist regimes. The article focuses on the institutional role conceptions of data protection authorities—a theoretical concept that denotes perceptions of the role of an organization within the larger institutional environment. High-level officials from data protection authorities in sixteen countries were interviewed about change and continuity in surveillance. The results show that historical reflectivity is not a dominant feature of the leadership of contemporary data protection authorities and that different countries differ considerably. The respondents least able or willing to discuss the topics of change and continuity are in societies with recent high-level surveillance scandals, such as Bulgaria and North Macedonia.","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124906528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Systems of Choreography: Performing Normal in Public","authors":"Molly Roy","doi":"10.24908/SS.V19I1.14441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/SS.V19I1.14441","url":null,"abstract":"Building upon facial recognition and other systems of identification, the next generation of biometric technology includes behavior recognition, training AI to analyze and interpret how bodies move in public spaces. Paired with already ubiquitous CCTV cameras, these software systems detect a range of motions—trips, falls, fighting, irregular gait—anything that deviates from the established norm. In this paper, I argue that by criminalizing certain movements, behavior recognition technologies effectively codify a technique, a vocabulary of acceptable and allowable movements, enacting a form of social choreography. Within this choreography, what movements are available to whom? What constitutes normal, and who is afforded or denied such a claim? In the fall of 2019, I undertook a corporeal engagement with these questions through the development of a short video project entitled One True False Move, seeking to disrupt the codes of normalcy and destabilize the surveillant technology’s position as social choreographer. In theorizing a conceptual framework and reflecting upon creative practice, I explore the body as a site of resistance, endowed with the resilient capacity to move in or out of step with systematic codes and counter attempts to be rendered legible.","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126567524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Resonate Prison: Earwitnessing the Panacoustic Affect","authors":"G. Elmer, Stephen J. Neville","doi":"10.24908/SS.V19I1.13923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/SS.V19I1.13923","url":null,"abstract":"Panacoustic surveillance can be low-intensity and mundane, but when taken to its extreme, it is coordinated with physical violence to create an atmosphere of hallucinatory fear. Our entry point into this problem is through a case study of the Saydnaya torture prison in Syria, a terrifying and opaque architecture of power. This short paper draws from the earwitness art and human rights activism of Lawrence Abu Hamdan concerning Saydnaya in collaboration with Amnesty International: from our analysis of the prison, we extrapolate lessons of panacoustic technologies more broadly, which are not necessarily or immediately violent but nonetheless disempower subjects by constraining their behaviors and rendering walls indefensibly porous. In developing a nascent theory of panacoustic surveillance, this paper makes two distinct contributions to surveillance studies. First, it puts sound and surveillance studies scholars into dialogue to echo Hamdam’s argument that walls do not represent an absolute barrier but a corporeal medium by which power and knowledge can permeate and reflect as vibration. Second, our discussion articulates a politics of transparency and accountability that helps rethink notions of actuarial surveillance as not only a form of top-down statistical and biopolitical monitoring and governance but also as a means of developing panacoustic audits that seek to hold governments and other human rights abusers to account.","PeriodicalId":234638,"journal":{"name":"surveillance and society","volume":"384 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115911267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}