About me

this is me

I  am Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Surveillance Studies and Associate Professor  in the Sociology Department at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I am also cross-appointed in the Department of Geography and am part of the Cultural Studies program.

Until 31st August 2009, I was Reader in Surveillance Studies  at the Global Urban Research Unit at Newcastle University in the UK. I had an ESRC Research Fellowship for a project called Cultures of Urban Surveillance which looked at the globalization of surveillance across different countries. I remain a Visiting Fellow in GURU.

In 2013, I will be spending April and May as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, teaching on the Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar here at Queen’s and then going to Japan from mid-June as a JSPS Fellow, based at Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe. but also working with folks from Meiji University in Tokyo. I’ve previously been a visitor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil and Waseda University,also in Tokyo.

I’m the Editor-in-Chief of Surveillance & Society, the international journal of surveillance studies, and a founder-member of the Surveillance Studies Network. In 2006 I cordinated the influential Report on the Surveillance Society for the UK Information Commissioner (ICO) – and was part of the team for a short follow-up report coming out later this year – and organised submissions to the House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries on surveillance. More recently I was one of the initiators of the new European Science Foundation COST action, ‘Living in Surveillance Societies’ (LiSS), and a am collaborator in both The New Transparency initiative, run by The Surveillance Project at Queen’s, and consultant to a number of other initiatives.