About my project

My current project is called Cultures of Urban Surveillance. It´s designed to challenge and test assertions (including my own!) about the increasing ubiquity of surveillance, to examine it in different urban cultural contexts around the world.

With my move to Canada, this will still be my major project, but it will no longer be funded by the UK ESRC and I will have to look for new funding. The project will also expand in geographic scale and personnel, and will change some of its limiting criteria – in particular it will no longer focus only on so-called democracies. I will therefore be looking to take on PhD students and postdoctoral fellows to work on specific countries including Brazil, China and India, and countries in South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa, as well as the more theoretical and methodological aspects. If you’re interested and qualified, please contact me!

This is the basic outline for the UK-based research – bear in mind that it will change…

Surveillance works at all scales. It is about the integration of surveillance technologies into the infrastructure and built fabric of cities. It is about the transnational networks of satellites and telecommunications from the Internet to mobile telephones, in use for far more than just the personal: the prevention, perpetuation, making and ending of wars and conflicts; the monitoring of climate, ecosystems and the lives of other species; and the maintenance of a global economic order. It is about the changing boundaries between human beings and technologies: the ways in which technologies become increasingly part of ‘us’ and our politics and identity become technological.

In global cities, the ‘command centres’ of the global economy, most aspects of everyday life are subject to multiple forms of surveillance. These systems add up to an information infrastructure, which is essential in the life of contemporary cities, and in which people, for the most part, participate willingly if not enthusiastically.

My current project aims to develop a more rounded understanding of life in global cities characterised by increasingly ubiquitous surveillance. It aims in particular to consider the extent of the globalisation of risk, security, and the forms, operation, understanding and interactions of surveillance. Further it aims to understand how these are mediated or moderated by specific cultures. It aims to encompass both general trends and differentiations of values, expectations, challenges, prospects and problems in emerging surveillance societies in particular localities, with varied cultural expectations and social norms. The project has three broad sets of questions:

1. The extent of surveillance. How much surveillance is there? What are the forms of surveillance? How far do they extend and how deep do they go? And how do we know and what do we measure when we make claims about increasing surveillance?
2. The political economy of surveillance. How do surveillance markets, technologies, policy and politics interact in these cities? What is the relative strength of globalizing forces (dominant security and economic orientations) and national or local forces? How can this help guide policy and action?
3. The understanding of surveillance. How do individuals and groups form their conceptions of surveillance? How important is it to them? How do these conceptions and ethics vary in different societies and cultures? Can this help us develop new ethical forms of, or responses to, surveillance?

The fieldwork for the project is four case-studies of global cities in different democratic states. This is because there are different problems and issues with authoritarian regimes or less formal systems of governance. The cities chosen were London, UK; Tokyo, Japan; Toronto, Canada; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The project draws on invitations from academic institutions in each nation: in Japan, Waseda University, Tokyo, and Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe; in Canada, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario; and in Brazil, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Catholic University of Parana. The aim is to work backwards from the places about which I initially knew least to that I supposedly know most (London) in order to make the familiar more strange.

Three parallel streams of research are being carried out in each city:

1. assessment and development of quantitative and qualitative indices of surveillance;
2. interviews on the political economy of surveillance.
3. workshops on understanding, and the ethics, of surveillance.