Reckoning with COVID, Racial Violence, and the Perilous Pursuit of Transparency

This essay reflects on the many upheavals of the past year and their implications for critical scholarship on surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic, anti-science policies, radicalized white supremacists, police killings of people of color, and the resurgence of the racial justice movement all inflect surveillance practices in the contemporary moment. In particular, today’s polarized political landscape makes it difficult to condemn surveillance in the service of the public good, but irrespective of one’s goals or intentions, the embrace of transparency carries its own risks. Transparency, and scientific vision more broadly, is an extension of the Enlightenment and subsequent scientific revolution, which from the start sought to advance knowledge and consolidate white power through the violent subjugation of nature, women, and racial minorities. One fundamental risk of valorizing transparency is that doing so occludes the ways that relations of domination are indelibly encoded into surveillance systems and practices. Given this, I argue that the project of decolonizing surveillance inquiry should now be our primary focus as a field.