The digital age is also a surveillance age. In turn, questions of surveillance are always also qu... more The digital age is also a surveillance age. In turn, questions of surveillance are always also questions of geography. "Surveillance & Space" investigates, conceptualizes and problematizes the complex ways in which surveillance is bound up with space, from the disciplinary space of Bentham's panoptic prison, to the spatially articulated gaze of CCTV camras, and to the fluid spatialities of control that characterise today's world of big data.
The digital age is also a surveillance age. In turn, questions of surveillance are always also qu... more The digital age is also a surveillance age. In turn, questions of surveillance are always also questions of geography. "Surveillance & Space" investigates, conceptualizes and problematizes the complex ways in which surveillance is bound up with space, from the disciplinary space of Bentham's panoptic prison, to the spatially articulated gaze of CCTV camras, and to the fluid spatialities of control that characterise today's world of big data.
Statement The Editors do not necessarily agree with the statements contained in the book reviews,... more Statement The Editors do not necessarily agree with the statements contained in the book reviews, and neither they nor the RGS-IBG assume responsibility for the reviewers’ assessments of the books that they evaluate.
One of the key areas that surveillance studies has been conspicuously little involved in, with on... more One of the key areas that surveillance studies has been conspicuously little involved in, with only a few exceptions (Donaldson and Wood, 2004; Donaldson 2012; Ottinger 2010; Haggerty and Trottier 2015; Archer 2021), has been the environment and nature. As it becomes increasingly obvious that the effects of the climate crisis are already with us, and with biodiversity loss accelerating, and the environmental justice issues associated with these crises and the potential responses to them worryingly unaddressed, it seems clear that surveillance studies should have more to say. In this free-form, wide-ranging discussion, Simone Browne, Francisco Klauser, and David Murakami Wood, three leading surveillance studies scholars who’ve all been involved in the field and the journal for most, if not all, of its history, discuss the different ways in which their research is dealing with questions of environment, nature, and sustainability and how surveillance studies more broadly could engage. ...
Building Power, by Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, has the potential to become a critical benchmark for ... more Building Power, by Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, has the potential to become a critical benchmark for scholars in surveillance studies, offering a compelling range of micro-scale studies into the multiple and complex relationships between surveillance and space. More specifically, the book explores the manifold and highly elaborate ways in which, in the Victorian period, surveillance informed and codified the design and spatial arrangement of various building-types in the United States: prisons, post offices, factories, private houses and religious camp grounds. Anchored in the field of architectural history, yet refreshingly unconstrained by the discipline's heavy traditions, Andrzejewski's investigation is structured into four main parts, relating to four key objectives of surveillance: discipline, efficiency, hierarchy and fellowship. The book illuminates one by one each of these dimensions of surveillance, by discussing its mediating role on architecture and spatial design. I...
This article explores in empirical detail the air-bound expectations, imaginations and practices ... more This article explores in empirical detail the air-bound expectations, imaginations and practices arising from the acquisition of a new police drone in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. The study shows how drones are transforming the ways in which the aerial realm is lived as a context, object and perspective of policing. This tripartite structure is taken as a prism through which to advance novel understandings of the simultaneously elemental and affective, sensory, cognitive and practical dimensions of the aerial volumes within, on and through which drones act. The study of the ways in which these differing dimensions are bound together in how the police think about drones and what they do with them enables the development of an ‘aerial geopolitics of security’ that, from a security viewpoint, approaches interactions between power and space in a three-dimensional and cross-ontological way.
Farming today relies on ever-increasing forms of data gathering, transfer, and analysis. Think of... more Farming today relies on ever-increasing forms of data gathering, transfer, and analysis. Think of autonomous tractors and weeding robots, chip-implanted animals and underground infrastructures with inbuilt sensors, and drones or satellites offering image analysis from the air. Despite this evolution, however, the social sciences have almost completely overlooked the resulting problematics of power and control. This piece offers an initial review of the main surveillance issues surrounding the problematic of smart farming, with a view to outlining a broader research agenda into the making, functioning, and acting of Big Data in the agricultural sector. For surveillance studies, the objective is also to move beyond the predominant focus on urban space that characterises critical contemporary engagements with Big Data. Smart technologies shape the rural just as much as the urban, and “smart farms” are just as fashionable as “smart cities.”
In recent years, the rapidly developing field of ‘surveillance studies’ has sparked a remarkable ... more In recent years, the rapidly developing field of ‘surveillance studies’ has sparked a remarkable and revealing body of research, which has led to repeated claims to recognise ‘surveillance studies’ as a cross-disciplinary field of research in its own right. However, the almost exclusive reliance of these independency claims upon Anglophone references raises a series of important questions: Must we conclude that other linguistic traditions in surveillance studies do not exist at all, or are we to assume that such studies are heading in a broadly similar direction as their English counterpart?In order to address these questions, the paper suggests engaging with ‘lost’ CCTV studies published in French academia. It succinctly discusses three specificities of the French CCTV context – the legal regulation of CCTV through the 1995 ‘Loi Pasqua’, the specialised economic journal ‘En toute sécurité’ and the quasi absence of publicly mandated statistical evaluations of open street CCTV system...
Recent debates on surveillance have emphasised the now myriad possibilities of automated, softwar... more Recent debates on surveillance have emphasised the now myriad possibilities of automated, software-based data gathering, management and analysis. One of the many terms used to describe this phenomenon is ‘Big Data’. The field of Big Data covers a large and complex range of practices and technologies from smart borders to CCTV video analysis, and from consumer profiling to self-tracking applications. The paper’s aim is to explore the surveillance dynamics inherent in contemporary Big Data trends. To this end, the paper adopts two main perspectives concerned with two complementary expressions of Big Data: (1) the individual use of various techniques of self-surveillance and tracking and (2) the simultaneous trend to optimise urban infrastructures through smart information technologies. Drawing upon exploratory research conducted by the authors, the paper shows that both expressions of Big Data present a range of common surveillance dynamics on at least four levels: agency, temporality...
Uploads
Books
Academic journals