Torin Monahan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3582928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Torin Monahan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Torin |
| FAMILY NAME | Monahan |
| SIGNATURE | MONAHAN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9055-399X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 606 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Flock on campus: University police as appendages of a national policing apparatus
Dangerous new forms of networked surveillance are gaining traction with police departments across the United States. One popular example is Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system, which indiscriminately exposes millions of people to fine-grained tracking of their movements over time. Drawing on open-records requests filed with US public universities and colleges, this article shows how campus police departments’ use of t…
Grounding the Flock: Confronting Police Surveillance of Mobilities
This article explores the integration of AI-surveillance functionality into urban infrastructures to question how the monitoring of mobilities could engender vulnerabilities, particularly for minoritized or stigmatized groups in society. Focusing on the automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) system deployed in the United States by the company Flock Safety, I show how this system acts as a communicative network that exposes people to discrimin…
Surveillance in Trump’s America
This paper sketches some of the key dangers presented by the second Trump presidency. We are witnessing a mainstreaming of far-right positions with profound implications both for government and the constitution of society. This moment is marked by censorship and self-censorship of the media, surveillance and punishment of immigrant communities, attacks on higher education, throttled scientific research, a war on gender, the evisceration of govern…
Silencing Dissent: Surveillance and Police Actions on University Campuses during Pro-Palestinian Protests
This paper analyzes the relationship between surveillance, violence, and dissent on university campuses in the United States. With a focus on administrative and police responses to pro-Palestinian protesters in particular, I show how surveillance facilitates selective, targeted discipline of students and faculty members expressing pro-Palestinian positions. I explore these dynamics with Colombia University’s police crackdown on protesters; Univer…
Revitalizing Dissent: Imperatives for Critical Surveillance Inquiry
In this introduction to Surveillance & Society’s twentieth anniversary issue, we reflect on the journal’s role in the formation and maturation of the field and on some of the many areas in need of further study and intervention. In keeping with one of the journal’s original objectives of “encouraging debate and dissent,” we argue that it is imperative that the field reaffirm this dissenting posture. Such dissent would be primarily critical and de…
Transit's downward spiral: Assessing the social-justice implications of ride-hailing platforms and Covid-19 for public transportation in the US
Recoding the city: Cultural mediation of short-term rental platforms in the US
This paper explores the cultural mediation of short-term rental (STR) platforms in US cities. While many STR advocates emphasize ‘authentic’ cultural experiences and the support of local economies, less obvious are the ways that STRs like Airbnb can erode communities by transforming homes into hotels and neighbours into strangers. STR platforms have significantly disrupted many communities through increased gentrification, resident displacement, …
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 …
Speculating on precarious income: Finance Cultures and the Risky Strategies of Healthy Volunteers in Clinical Drug Trials
This speculative calculus valorizes fictional projections of significant long-term future income over present financial opportunities. For the economically precarious individuals in our study, we argue that rather than effectively increasing their income, speculation on contract work serves a compensatory function, providing an important-but ultimately inadequate-sense of control over market conditions that thrive upon workers' economic insecurit…
Monopolizing mobilities: The data politics of ride-hailing platforms in US cities
Dis-ease Surveillance: How Might Surveillance Studies Address Covid-19
We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk. We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measure…
The arresting gaze: Artistic disruptions of antiblack surveillance
This article analyzes a range of art and performance pieces that unearth and problematize the racist cultural underpinnings of surveillance. Drawing upon recent black studies scholarship, I probe the ways that contemporary creative works disrupt dominant signifying regimes that would position racialized surveillance/violence couplings as historical and exceptional rather than as foundational and routine. I argue that such aesthetic disruptions ac…
Sacrificial Labour: Social Inequality, Identity Work, and the Damaging Pursuit of Elusive Futures
This article explores the relationship between personal sacrifice and identity work within conditions of profound structural insecurity. We develop the concept of sacrificial labour to describe how individual self-sacrifice aligns workers' identities to the needs of organizations while gradually foreclosing the actualization of individuals' desired future selves. Drawing upon qualitative data from a longitudinal study of healthy individuals who e…
Ways of being seen: Surveillance art and the interpellation of viewing subjects
Critical artworks about surveillance introduce compelling possibilities for rethinking the relationship of people to larger systems of control. This paper analyses a number of art projects that strive to render surveillance visible and cultivate a sense of responsibility on the part of viewers or participants. Some of the projects show the human costs of surveillance-facilitated drone violence and urge viewers to take action, others use tactics o…
Healthy Volunteers’ Perceptions of the Benefits of Their Participation in Phase I Clinical Trials
Other than the financial motivations for enrolling in Phase I trials, research on how healthy volunteers perceive the benefits of their trial participation is scant. Using qualitative interviews conducted with 178 U.S. healthy volunteers enrolled in Phase I trials, we investigated how participants described the benefits of their study involvement, including, but not limited to, the financial compensation, and we analyzed how these perceptions var…
Algorithmic Fetishism
Surveillance-infused forms of algorithmic discrimination are beginning to capture public and scholarly attention. While this is an encouraging development, this editorial questions the parameters of this emerging discussion and cautions against algorithmic fetishism. I characterize algorithmic fetishism as the pleasurable pursuit of opening the black box, discovering the code hidden inside, exploring its beauty and flaws, and explicating its intr…
Surveillance Studies: A Reader
Regulating belonging: Surveillance, Inequality, and the Cultural Production of Abjection
Conditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies that challenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenship are categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing and often violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in such processes. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfare systems, battered women’s shelters…
Built to lie: Investigating technologies of deception, surveillance, and control
This article explores technological systems that dissimulate by design. Examples include untrustworthy hotel and workplace thermostats, digital applications to spy on workers and family members, and commercial and law-enforcement systems that surreptitiously collect mobile phone data. Rather than view such cases as exceptional, I argue that deceptive communication systems are hidden articulations of normal technological orders. If deception in it…
Constructing the Suspicious: Data Production, Circulation, and Interpretation by DHS Fusion Centers
Suspicious activity reports (SARs) are an increasingly important tool in the law-enforcement repertoire, especially for counterterrorism. In spite of significant problems with such reports, they are experiencing a resurgence that can be attributed partly to the institutionalization of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “fusion centers,” which are taking the lead in vetting and interpreting these reports as they enter into law-enforcement and c…
The Right to Hide? Anti-Surveillance Camouflage and the Aestheticization of Resistance
There has been a recent surge in artistic designs to conceal oneself from ambient surveillance in public places. These center on the masking of identity to undermine technological efforts to fix someone as a unique entity apart from the crowd. Ranging from fractal face paint and hairstyles, to realistic resin masks, to reflective underwear, anti-surveillance camouflage ostensibly allows people to hide in plain sight. These designs, however, enact…
I'm still a hustler: Entrepreneurial responses to precarity by participants in phase I clinical trials
This paper questions the implications of entrepreneurial responses to conditions of employment precarity by 'healthy volunteers' in phase I clinical trials in the United States. Such individuals are typically serial participants who often identify as professional volunteers and seek out drug studies as their primary source of income. Drawing on extensive qualitative research, this paper illustrates how healthy volunteers selectively import the id…
Compromised Trust: DHS Fusion Centers' Policing of the Occupy Wall Street Movement
State surveillance programs often operate in direct tension with ideals of democratic governance and accountability. The fraught history of surveillance programs in the United States, for instance, illustrates that government agencies mobilize discourses of exceptional circumstances to engage in domestic and foreign spying operations without public awareness or oversight. While many scholars, civil society groups, and media pundits have drawn att…
Strategies for Obtaining Access to Secretive or Guarded Organizations
Establishing contacts and gaining permission to conduct ethnographic or qualitative research can be time-consuming and stressful processes. Gaining access can be especially challenging when representatives of prospective research sites see their work as being sensitive and would prefer to avoid outside scrutiny altogether. One result of this dynamic is that many organizations that exert a profound influence in governing populations and regulating…
Fusion Center Accountability and Intergovernmental Information Sharing
Following the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the states cooperated in the establishment of fusion centers to facilitate sharing of data across government agencies, as well as across the public and private sectors. Based on interviews with officials in thirty-six different fusion centers and review of government documents and reports on fusion centers’ activities, this article analyzes the int…
Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity
Threats of terrorism, natural disaster, identity theft, job loss, illegal immigration, and even biblical apocalypse-all are perils that trigger alarm in people today. Although there may be a factual basis for many of these fears, they do not simply represent objective conditions. Feelings of insecurity are instilled by politicians and the media, and sustained by urban fortification, technological surveillance, and economic vulnerability. Surveill…
Benefits of 'observer effects: Lessons From the Field
This article responds to the criticism that 'observer effects' in ethnographic research necessarily bias and possibly invalidate research findings. Instead of aspiring to distance and detachment, some of the greatest strengths of ethnographic research lie in cultivating close ties with others and collaboratively shaping discourses and practices in the field. Informants' performances - however staged for or influenced by the observer - often revea…
Counter-surveillance as Political Intervention
This paper analyzes practices of counter-surveillance—particularly against closed-circuit television systems in urban areas—and theorizes their political implications. Counter-surveillance is defined as intentional, tactical uses, or disruptions of surveillance technologies to challenge institutional power asymmetries. Such activities can include disabling or destroying surveillance cameras, mapping paths of least surveillance and disseminating t…
Surveillance and violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes
As surveillance and military devices, drones—or ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’—offer a prism for theorizing the technological politics of warfare and governance. This prism reveals some violent articulations of US imperialism and nationalism, the dehumanizing translation of bodies into ‘targets’ for remote monitoring and destruction, and the insidious application of militarized systems and rationalities to domestic territories and populations. In thi…
The New American School: Preparation for post‐industrial discipline
In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in US public schools. We argue that the contemporary mechanisms of control engendered by mass incarceration and post‐industrialization have re‐shaped school discipline. To illustrate contemporary discipline in the 'New American School,' we discuss the emergence of police officers and technological surveillance in s…
Surveillance as Cultural Practice
This special section of The Sociological Quarterly explores research on “surveillance as cultural practice,” which indicates an orientation to surveillance that views it as embedded within, brought about by, and generative of social practices in specific cultural contexts. Such an approach is more likely to include elements of popular culture, media, art, and narrative; it is also more likely to try to comprehend people's engagement with surveill…
Dis-ease Surveillance: How Might Surveillance Studies Address Covid-19
We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk. We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measure…
Dreams of Control at a Distance: Gender, Surveillance, and Social Control
Modern surveillance systems operate upon masculine logics of disembodied control at a distance. As such, they artificially abstract bodies, identities, and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure and aggravate gender and other social inequalities. This article explores the gender dimensions of surveillance systems in several public domains: welfare, healthcare, and transportation. By exposing the dominant rationalities of such…
Strategies for Obtaining Access to Secretive or Guarded Organizations
Establishing contacts and gaining permission to conduct ethnographic or qualitative research can be time-consuming and stressful processes. Gaining access can be especially challenging when representatives of prospective research sites see their work as being sensitive and would prefer to avoid outside scrutiny altogether. One result of this dynamic is that many organizations that exert a profound influence in governing populations and regulating…
Regulating belonging: Surveillance, Inequality, and the Cultural Production of Abjection
Conditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies that challenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenship are categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing and often violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in such processes. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfare systems, battered women’s shelters…
The Right to Hide? Anti-Surveillance Camouflage and the Aestheticization of Resistance
There has been a recent surge in artistic designs to conceal oneself from ambient surveillance in public places. These center on the masking of identity to undermine technological efforts to fix someone as a unique entity apart from the crowd. Ranging from fractal face paint and hairstyles, to realistic resin masks, to reflective underwear, anti-surveillance camouflage ostensibly allows people to hide in plain sight. These designs, however, enact…
The Emerging Politics of DHS Fusion Centers
This article explores public concerns about the US Department of Homeland Security’s data ‘fusion centers’. These centers, which are proliferating across all US states, coordinate data-sharing among state and local police, intelligence agencies, and private companies. The primary goal of fusion centers is to engage in intelligence-sharing for counter-terrorism purposes. However, they have been used for a variety of other purposes, such as basic p…
Identity theft vulnerability: Neoliberal governance through crime construction
Under the rubric of neoliberalism, the governance of populations occurs through new technologies and techniques of social control. Contemporary neoliberal discourses of crime control, in particular, normalize conditions of individual insecurity and responsibility while diverting attention away from root causes of social problems. The phenomenon of identity theft offers a generative case study for theorizing the ramifications of neoliberalism as a…
I'm still a hustler: Entrepreneurial responses to precarity by participants in phase I clinical trials
This paper questions the implications of entrepreneurial responses to conditions of employment precarity by 'healthy volunteers' in phase I clinical trials in the United States. Such individuals are typically serial participants who often identify as professional volunteers and seek out drug studies as their primary source of income. Drawing on extensive qualitative research, this paper illustrates how healthy volunteers selectively import the id…
Surveillance and Empowerment
This issue of Surveillance & Society examines the social implications of contemporary surveillance with a focus on the complexities of empowerment. Our purpose is not to stake a claim or chart a new course, but instead to recognize and encourage a mode of inquiry that has been emerging for some time
Zones of Opacity: Data Fusion in Post-9/11 Security Organizations
In this paper, we draw upon empirical research on fusion centres to theorize contemporary state surveillance. Instead of viewing fusion centres as central repositories for stockpiling and sharing personal data, we introduce the concept of "centres of concatenation" to describe how disparate data are drawn together as needed, invested with meaning, communicated to others, and then discarded such that no records exist of such surveillance activitie…
Los Angeles Studies: The Emergence of a Specialty Field
Built to lie: Investigating technologies of deception, surveillance, and control
This article explores technological systems that dissimulate by design. Examples include untrustworthy hotel and workplace thermostats, digital applications to spy on workers and family members, and commercial and law-enforcement systems that surreptitiously collect mobile phone data. Rather than view such cases as exceptional, I argue that deceptive communication systems are hidden articulations of normal technological orders. If deception in it…
Electronic Fortification in Phoenix: Surveillance Technologies and Social Regulation in Residential Communities
This article compares experiences of surveillance technologies in low-income public housing and affluent gated communities in Phoenix, Arizona. Contrary to the popular discourse of surveillance as ensuring protection from external threats, in practice, both groups feel subjected to undesired individual scrutiny and policing of their behaviors. Nonetheless, key differences exist. First, residents in gated communities possess relative mobility and …
The arresting gaze: Artistic disruptions of antiblack surveillance
This article analyzes a range of art and performance pieces that unearth and problematize the racist cultural underpinnings of surveillance. Drawing upon recent black studies scholarship, I probe the ways that contemporary creative works disrupt dominant signifying regimes that would position racialized surveillance/violence couplings as historical and exceptional rather than as foundational and routine. I argue that such aesthetic disruptions ac…
Algorithmic Fetishism
Surveillance-infused forms of algorithmic discrimination are beginning to capture public and scholarly attention. While this is an encouraging development, this editorial questions the parameters of this emerging discussion and cautions against algorithmic fetishism. I characterize algorithmic fetishism as the pleasurable pursuit of opening the black box, discovering the code hidden inside, exploring its beauty and flaws, and explicating its intr…
Fusion Center Accountability and Intergovernmental Information Sharing
Following the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the states cooperated in the establishment of fusion centers to facilitate sharing of data across government agencies, as well as across the public and private sectors. Based on interviews with officials in thirty-six different fusion centers and review of government documents and reports on fusion centers’ activities, this article analyzes the int…
The "biosecuritization" of healthcare delivery: Examples of post-9/11 technological imperatives
Transit's downward spiral: Assessing the social-justice implications of ride-hailing platforms and Covid-19 for public transportation in the US
Constructing the Suspicious: Data Production, Circulation, and Interpretation by DHS Fusion Centers
Suspicious activity reports (SARs) are an increasingly important tool in the law-enforcement repertoire, especially for counterterrorism. In spite of significant problems with such reports, they are experiencing a resurgence that can be attributed partly to the institutionalization of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “fusion centers,” which are taking the lead in vetting and interpreting these reports as they enter into law-enforcement and c…
Arson: The Criminal and the Crime
W. HURLEY, T. M. MONAHAN; ARSON: THE CRIMINAL AND THE CRIME, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 9, Issue 1, 1 January 1969, Pages 4–21, https://doi
The analog divide: Technology Practices in Public Education
article Share on The analog divide: technology practices in public education Author: Torin Monahan Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCAS Computers and SocietyVolume 31Issue 3September 2001 pp 22–31https://doi.org/10.1145/504696.504700Online:01 September 2001Publication History 5citation843DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations5Total Downloads843Last 12 Months2Last 6 weeks0 Get Cita…
Please Increase Your Browser's Memory Partition Individual Action and Collective Blame in the Hall of Biodiversity
Somatic Surveillance: Corporeal Control through Information Networks
Somatic surveillance is the increasingly invasive technological monitoring of and intervention into body functions. Within this type of surveillance regime, bodies are recast as nodes on vast information networks, enabling corporeal control through remote network commands, automated responses, or self-management practices. In this paper, we investigate three developments in somatic surveillance: nanotechnology systems for soldiers on the battlefi…
Surveillance and Inequality
Los Angeles Studies: The Emergence of a Specialty Field
Technology policy as a stealth agent of global change
Drawing upon a year of ethnographic research with the Los Angeles public school system, this article follows the translation and negotiation of several key technology grants and their policies. It argues that as a global trend, myths of technological neutrality and transparency merely cloud the panoply of negotiations taking place in public organizations, subsequently removing those decisions from public participation or scrutiny. Technology poli…
Just Another Tool? IT Pedagogy and the Commodification of Education
The School System as a Post-Fordist Organization: Fragmented Centralization and the Emergence of IT Specialists
This article explores organizational restructuring in one large public institution as a situated response to the instabilities brought on by globalization. Drawing upon ethnographic research with the Los Angeles public school system, I argue that a process of fragmented centralization is taking place, whereby decision-making authority is becoming more centralized while accountability for centrally made decisions is becoming more distributed. This…
Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life
This is a volume of original contributions from scholars in eight different humanities and social science disciplines. The aim of the book is to present a range of surveillance technologies used in everyday life and investigate the politics of their use. It is truly an interdisciplinary project that will find purchase in courses on security studies and the sociology of culture and the sociology of science. Courses on security studies and its impa…
Counter-surveillance as Political Intervention
This paper analyzes practices of counter-surveillance—particularly against closed-circuit television systems in urban areas—and theorizes their political implications. Counter-surveillance is defined as intentional, tactical uses, or disruptions of surveillance technologies to challenge institutional power asymmetries. Such activities can include disabling or destroying surveillance cameras, mapping paths of least surveillance and disseminating t…
The New American School: Preparation for post‐industrial discipline
In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in US public schools. We argue that the contemporary mechanisms of control engendered by mass incarceration and post‐industrialization have re‐shaped school discipline. To illustrate contemporary discipline in the 'New American School,' we discuss the emergence of police officers and technological surveillance in s…
Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life
Electronic Fortification in Phoenix: Surveillance Technologies and Social Regulation in Residential Communities
This article compares experiences of surveillance technologies in low-income public housing and affluent gated communities in Phoenix, Arizona. Contrary to the popular discourse of surveillance as ensuring protection from external threats, in practice, both groups feel subjected to undesired individual scrutiny and policing of their behaviors. Nonetheless, key differences exist. First, residents in gated communities possess relative mobility and …
Marketing the beast: Left Behind and the apocalypse industry
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. (Bible
Crime in an Insecure World
The Emerging Politics of DHS Fusion Centers
This article explores public concerns about the US Department of Homeland Security’s data ‘fusion centers’. These centers, which are proliferating across all US states, coordinate data-sharing among state and local police, intelligence agencies, and private companies. The primary goal of fusion centers is to engage in intelligence-sharing for counter-terrorism purposes. However, they have been used for a variety of other purposes, such as basic p…
Identity theft vulnerability: Neoliberal governance through crime construction
Under the rubric of neoliberalism, the governance of populations occurs through new technologies and techniques of social control. Contemporary neoliberal discourses of crime control, in particular, normalize conditions of individual insecurity and responsibility while diverting attention away from root causes of social problems. The phenomenon of identity theft offers a generative case study for theorizing the ramifications of neoliberalism as a…
Dreams of Control at a Distance: Gender, Surveillance, and Social Control
Modern surveillance systems operate upon masculine logics of disembodied control at a distance. As such, they artificially abstract bodies, identities, and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure and aggravate gender and other social inequalities. This article explores the gender dimensions of surveillance systems in several public domains: welfare, healthcare, and transportation. By exposing the dominant rationalities of such…
Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity
Threats of terrorism, natural disaster, identity theft, job loss, illegal immigration, and even biblical apocalypse-all are perils that trigger alarm in people today. Although there may be a factual basis for many of these fears, they do not simply represent objective conditions. Feelings of insecurity are instilled by politicians and the media, and sustained by urban fortification, technological surveillance, and economic vulnerability. Surveill…
Surveillance and Empowerment
This issue of Surveillance & Society examines the social implications of contemporary surveillance with a focus on the complexities of empowerment. Our purpose is not to stake a claim or chart a new course, but instead to recognize and encourage a mode of inquiry that has been emerging for some time
Benefits of 'observer effects: Lessons From the Field
This article responds to the criticism that 'observer effects' in ethnographic research necessarily bias and possibly invalidate research findings. Instead of aspiring to distance and detachment, some of the greatest strengths of ethnographic research lie in cultivating close ties with others and collaboratively shaping discourses and practices in the field. Informants' performances - however staged for or influenced by the observer - often revea…
Surveillance Impediments: Recognizing Obduracy with the Deployment of Hospital Information Systems
Although the field of Surveillance Studies privileges detailed accounts of how and when surveillance occurs, it is also important to remain open to instances of aborted or failed surveillance and manifold impediments to surveillance. It is vital for researchers to document and theorize absence in order to better understand and perhaps mitigate the presence of egregious forms of surveillance. To this end, in this paper we discuss some of the many …
Surveillance and violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes
As surveillance and military devices, drones—or ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’—offer a prism for theorizing the technological politics of warfare and governance. This prism reveals some violent articulations of US imperialism and nationalism, the dehumanizing translation of bodies into ‘targets’ for remote monitoring and destruction, and the insidious application of militarized systems and rationalities to domestic territories and populations. In thi…
The "biosecuritization" of healthcare delivery: Examples of post-9/11 technological imperatives
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