Work with me! Funded Studentship, ‘Hired Hackers and Private Spies,’ at uOttawa

English (French below)

UPDATED: Now Open to Canadian Citizens and Permanent Residents (or those who qualify as Canadian domestic students) ONLY.

I am looking for a top-level almost or recently completed Masters student in surveillance studies / security studies / criminology / sociology / organisation studies / STS / IR / political science etc., to take on a 4-year funded PhD studentship, ‘Hired Hackers and Private Spies,’ which will conduct a global survey and carry out case-studies of transnational private cybersurveillance companies. The most well-known of these, e.g. NSO Group, have received a lot of attention but there is a rapidly expanding world of private cybersurveillance companies out there which is just waiting to be studied –and indeed, controlled and regulated.

The researcher I am looking for must have,

  • a clear interest in surveillance and security, demonstrated by their thesis and coursework, and ideally, attendance at relevant conferences and events, or even published work,
  • a willingness and potential to conduct independent international research with high standards of scholarship and ethics, demonstrated by their reference letters from supervisor(s) and/or lecturers;

and, preferably,

  • to be writing, or have written, their Masters thesis on cybersurveillance, cybersecurity or a related topic, in a military, police or private security industry context.

The PhD would be based in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-social-sciences/criminology. The successful candidate would be part of my proposed Critical Surveillance and Security Studies Lab along with a strong group of PhD and MA students and rotating visitors, and potential both the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS),  https://techlaw.uottawa.ca/, and the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS), https://www.cips-cepi.ca/. The project is funded by the Canadian SSHRC ‘Human-Centric Cybersecurity Partnership’ (HC2P), https://www.hc2p.ca/, led by Benoit Dupont at the Université de Montréal, in Quebec. You will also have the opportunity to take part in external events and initiatives connected to this partnership.

Funding

The funding for the project is $25,000 CAD per year for 4 years. The successful student will receive a stipend which starts at just under $20,000 CAD per year, rising by 1.02% each year, and the rest of the project funds will be available as research costs.

*This funding is independent of any TA, scholarship or funding offered by the Department of Criminology or any external scholarship or grant received by the student.

Important Dates:

UPDATED! Inquiry deadline – a brief cover letter, CV and writing sample, to <david.mw@uottawa.ca> : 15th January 2024 

*only open to Canadian-based applicants from this point (because of application deadline)

Application deadline (Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents): 1st February 2024

PhD start-date (fixed): 1st September 2024

Admission requirements and dates can be found here:

https://www.uottawa.ca/study/graduate-studies/program-specific-requirements

NB:  the University of Ottawa is a bilingual English / French university, and all English-speaking PhD students must also achieve a basic level of French competence before they can be granted their PhD. If you are already a francophone (with good English), bilingual or have a reasonable standard of French, this is an advantage. As this is an international project, other languages are a bonus!

DMW

Français

MISE À JOUR : Maintenant ouvert aux citoyens canadiens et aux résidents permanents (ou à ceux qui sont admissibles en tant qu’étudiants nationaux canadiens) UNIQUEMENT.

Je recherche un étudiant de haut niveau en maîtrise presque ou récemment terminé, en études de surveillance / études de sécurité / criminologie / sociologie / STS / IR / sciences politiques, etc., pour entreprendre une bourse de doctorat financée sur 4 ans, « Hired Hackers and Private Spies», qui mènera une enquête mondiale et réalisera des études de cas sur des sociétés transnationales privées de cybersurveillance. Les plus connus d’entre eux, par ex. NSO Group a reçu beaucoup d’attention, mais il existe un monde en pleine expansion de sociétés privées de cybersurveillance qui n’attendent que d’être étudiées – et même contrôlées et réglementées.

L’étudiant que je recherche doit avoir,

  • un intérêt évident pour la surveillance et la sécurité, démontré par leur mémoire de maîtrise et leurs cours, et idéalement, la participation à des conférences et événements pertinents, ou même à des travaux publiés, 
  • une volonté et un potentiel de mener des recherches internationales indépendantes avec des normes élevées en matière d’érudition et d’éthique, démontrées par les lettres de référence de leurs superviseur(s);

et, de préférence,

  • rédiger ou avoir rédigé son mémoire de maîtrise sur la cybersurveillance, la cybersécurité ou un sujet connexe, dans un contexte militaire, policier ou de sécurité privée.

Le doctorat serait basé au Département de criminologie de l’Université d’Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, https://www.uottawa.ca/faculte-sciences-sociales/criminologie. Le candidat retenu ferait partie de mon projet de laboratoire d’études critiques de surveillance et de sécurité avec un groupe solide d’étudiants en doctorat et en maîtrise et de visiteurs en rotation, et potentiel à la fois au Centre pour le droit, la technologie et la société (CDTS), https://droittech.uottawa.ca/, et au Centre d’études sur les politiques internationales. (CEPI), https://www.cips-cepi.ca/. Le projet est financé par le « Human-Centric Cybersecurity Partnership » (HC2P) du CRSH canadien, https://www.hc2p.ca/, dirigé par Benoit Dupont de l’Université de Montréal, à Québec. Vous aurez également l’opportunité de participer à des événements et initiatives externes liés à ce partenariat.

Financement

Le financement du projet est de 25 000$ CAD par année pendant 4 ans. L’étudiant retenu recevra une allocation qui commence à un peu moins de 20 000 $ CAD par an, augmentant de 1,02 % chaque année, et le reste des fonds du projet sera disponible sous forme de frais de recherche. 

*Ce financement est indépendant de toute TA, bourse ou financement offert par le Département de criminologie ou de toute bourse ou subvention externe reçue par l’étudiant.

Dates importants:

Date limite de demande – une brève lettre de motivation, un résumé et un exemple de votre travail écrit, à <david.mw@uottawa.ca> : 15er Janvier 2024

*elle ne sera ouverte qu’aux candidats basés au Canada à partir de ce moment (en raison des dates limites de candidature) 

Date limite de candidature : 1er février 2024

Date de début de thèse (fixe) : 1er septembre 2024

Les conditions d’admission et les dates peuvent être trouvées ici: https://www.uottawa.ca/study/graduate-studies/program-special-requirements

NB : l’Université d’Ottawa est une université bilingue anglais/français, et tous les doctorants anglophones doivent également atteindre un niveau de base de compétence en français avant de pouvoir obtenir leur doctorat. Si vous êtes déjà francophone (avec de bonnes compétences en anglais), bilingue ou si vous avez un niveau raisonnable de français, c’est un avantage. Comme il s’agit d’un projet international, d’autres langues sont un bonus !

DMW

On robot ‘rights’

I’ve been encountering more, and more serious and sophisticated, arguments for the robot ‘rights’ recently and I have thoughts.

I am always open to the possibility that I may be missing or misunderstanding something but, it seems to me, that one way academic robot rights advocates think they will succeed is by attacking conventional western ontology. They tend to do this by arguing that a robot is something that blurs the supposed binary of ‘person’ and ‘thing’ and instead start by calling everything a ‘being.’

As a long-time environmental activist, I can’t help but feel partly responsible for this. This is because one of the main foundations for this argument is deep ecology / ecocentric thought, and what Arne Naess called the expansion of “the sphere of moral considerability,” in other words the extension of what we had previously considered to be the exclusive qualities of (white, male, able-bodied etc.) humans to more humans, animals and even ecosystems and things in the environment (mountains, rivers etc.). If a whale or a mountain can have rights, the argument goes, why not a robot? Aren’t they all ‘beings?’

But this is both disingenuous and a straw man, as well simply black-boxing, and thereby denying, the work that has already been done in creating the understanding of the concept of ‘being.’ What I mean by this is that in the discussion of rights, ‘being’ already means something and exists within a network of relations that produces power. For example it folds the notion of ‘living’ into ‘being’ so that the adjective is invisible. If we erase the concept of life here, sure, maybe ‘being’ no longer seems to require that quality. But ‘being’ can’t simply be applied to something else without a justification for that application that takes account of all of that work, the previous translations and movement, the qualities and qualifications and is able to perform a similar labour to some standard of satisfaction that we can recognise as successful.

Instead, rather than being in any way a fundamental reframing, just redefining everything as a ‘being’ reduces this application to a mere rhetorical move, one which just tries to associate all that existing work, and particularly the now invisible and black-boxed, ‘life’, with anything one choses. At the same, the the very existence of the rhetorical move itself is denied in the name of something like ‘deconstruction’ (well, anything will do, really…). It’s a classic power play.

In a materialist analysis, like all tools, robots are not living. They are devices created for extending and supplementing human power. Human power animates them and flows through them, not life. They produce nothing in themselves. It does not matter if a robot is given a cute name, or something that looks like a face, or is programmed to move as if it is dancing, or to use heuristic algorithms that alter its movement or function. It is not alive. It may be a ‘being’ if we accept that being can be redefined to mean anything, but it is not a living being.

Like calling it any tool a ‘being’, using this argument as a foundation for robot rights is an obfuscatatory gesture that is an attempted exercise of power whilst hiding power relations. This argument would have us believe that ultimately destroying a security robot is not fundamentally different from killing a cat or a human being. But cats and human beings are not security devices, they are alive. They are not devices whose only function is security. A security robot is just a security camera that can move and act in some way. it doesn’t acquire a different moral or legal quality because movement might once have been felt to be an exclusive quality of living beings. And destroying a security robot is fundamentally no different than destroying a surveillance camera. The only way the ‘being’ argument would work here is the absurd trajectory that the surveillance camera too has ‘rights,’ or maybe all cameras, or lenses or… no, there are no ‘rights’ at play here at all because there is no life.

What happens here is that robot rights are revealed as a Trojan horse for repression of human rights, not at like the weak sophism of claims that granting of rights to animals or mountains would weaken the purity of human rights, but directly, materially and politically. Robot rights mean we can’t fight back. Robot rights mean we should sit by whilst life itself is made subordinate to capitalist technology. Robot rights are a bad argument and they are bad politics.

Handbook of Critical Surveillance Studies

My big editing project for the next couple of years is the Handbook of Critical Surveillance Studies, with Rosamunde van Brakel, Fernanda Bruno and Azadeh Akbari, to be published with Edward Elgar in 2025.

I’ll keep a continually updated set of links for editorial and contribution purposes in this post.

There is contributors’ guidance here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/r.a0ee4615b393e07953488efe4722d312

And there is an ongoing thread of FAQs (which will also be added to the pad) here: https://twitter.com/murakamiwood/status/1680995375824396290

My Top (not just Science-) Fiction of the Year 2021

I read a lot of fiction this year, as usual, and most of it wasn’t SFF at all! If that’s what you’re interested in, you can skip the first three paragraphs here and scroll straight down…

In more mainstream writing, my favourite thing was undoubtedly The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, consisisting of Childhood, Youth, and Dependency, this is a sparse but evocative, no-holds-barred and banally shocking series of creative non-fiction about growing up poor but with ambitions to be a writer in the 1930s: although it’s memoir, it’s written in highly fictionalized manner, in terms of technique and editing choices. Published in Danish from 1967-71, but only translated into English in 2019, it is brilliant and clearly the precursor to a lot of intimate and exploratory feminist confessional works that have come after.

In crime, I worked my way through the entirety of the mostly very strong, Sicily-set, Montalbano series by the late Andrea Camilieri, and all of Ellis Peters’ atmospheric, mediaeval Cadfael books. But quite the best thing I read this year in this genre was The Stockholm Trilogy (Clinch, Down for the Count, and Slugger) by Martin Holmén. Published in English from 2015 to 2017, this trilogy is one of the most bleak crime series I’ve read. Also set in the 1930s, this is a Stockholm that is as far from contemporary wealthy, socially democratic Sweden as you can imagine, the protagonist Harry Kvist, is a brutal, permanently broke, none-too-bright, could-have-been-a-contender ex-boxer, who makes a living as a second-rate debt collector and accidental, third-rate private eye. He’s also queer and likes it rough. He’s hardly sympathetic, but the only thing in his favour is that most of the people he encounters are worse than him.

My Top 5 favourites in crime, published in 2021, were:

  1. Tokyo Redux, by the consistently excellent David Peace. Published this year, this is the long-awaited final book in The Tokyo Trilogy (the first two being Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City) of meandering fictional investigations of real crimes that took place in the aftermath of WW2 in the US-occupied Japanese capital. This is far more than a crime novel, and has nothing to do with any of the usual formulas. The characters are all horribly flawed and the racism and casual brutality of the occupiers, the police and criminal gangs is seedy, sweaty and right in your face. The language is also stunning, making superlative use of repetition, although it is not quite as incantatory and magical as in Occupied City. Now resident in Japan, I think Peace may be one of Britain’s greatest living novelists
  2. The Assistant, by Kjell Ola Dahl. Like his previous standalone novel, The Courier, this one is a hisorical crime novel set in 1920s and 30s Oslo (that’s the complete set of Scandanavian capitals in the 1930s!), with the threat of the Nazis hanging over Europe. It’s highly influenced by Raymond Chandler in terms of tone and the convoluted plot, but for once, unlike so many others that stray into pastiche, Chandler’s influence a good thing.
  3. Fallen Angels, by Gunnar Staelsen. Varg Veum, Staelsen’s Bergen-based, social worker-turned PI is not always a pleasant character, and in this one, the latest to be translated but actually a late 1980s entry in the series, we get a load of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but of the grimy, small town, provincial kind. As usual it’s also personal, involving an ex-wife and so-called friends from his past, who were all once involved in a ‘legendary’ local band, The Harpers. There are the usual reflective moments when Veum wonders what he was thinking / what he is doing – and it’s these as much as the investigation that makes this series so strong.
  4. Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino. Number 4 in the Detective Galileo series, in which DCI Kusanaga of the Tokyo police is leant a hand, once again, by Professor Yukawa (who the media has decided should be called ‘Detective Galileo’, because he’s a physics professor). This one deals with crimes old and new that may or may not be linked and it’s enjoyably twisty with a great cast of characters. However, I really do want Higashino to get back to his Detective Kaga series, which I think I prefer to this one.
  5. Walter Mosley’s Blood Grove didn’t quite live up to the very high standards I expect from this author. It is a fun read with plenty of action, and the usual insightful historical-sociological observations, but come the early 70s, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins seems to be increasingly living in some kind of hallucinatory fantasy version of Los Angeles, rather than (just) the real place. Maybe if you can remember it, you weren’t there, man…

Okay, so here is the SFF list that most of you will have been waiting for! I read a lot of older SF this year: interesting finds included D.G. Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, in which a dying woman in a world that largely does not know death, is placed under continuous surveillance for public entertainment. It did drag for a while but picked up in the final sequences: it is an essential surveillance novel. I also (re-)read several Robert Silverberg novels, and I enjoyed Poul Anderson’s time-travel classic, There Will Be Time, although I found the treatment of young female characters a bit creepy.

This is my Top 10 best SFF books of the year. Bear in mind that there are still many things I haven’t read yet, so if there’s something not here that you think should be, chances are I just haven’t got around to it yet

  1. The Actual Star by Monica Byrne. In many ways, I felt the spirit of Ursula Le Guin hovering over many of the things I read this year, this one included. Weaving together three stories set in 1012, 2012 and 3012 (in the western calendar), this superb novel deals with themes of environmental collapse, gender and sexuality, utopia, and indigeneity, amongst other things, with the stories united by Mayan cosmology and characters, and the significance of a small area of Belize (which I happen to have visited a long time ago).
  2. Notes from a Burning Age by Claire North. Another post-environmental collapse novel, this one by the pseudononymous author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (which I loved). This deals with the challenges that any stable, post-climate change society will inevitably face from fascists and expansionists who have chosen to forget why there are limits. The main character is a spy who gets incredibly badly-treated for most of the novel and it can be hard-going at times, although it is also redemptive.
  3. Like her earlier work, Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor’s typically powerful Remote Control can also be hard-going, not for the writing which is as skillful as ever, or the setting in a alt / near-future Nigeria, but simply for the difficulty of being in the skin / head of the protaganist, a young girl who has, through an encounter with some kind of alien technology, acquired the power of death. Her journey is marked, as a result, by almost continuous destruction and suffering, which even when it is ‘deserved’ is deeply troubling. Okorafor never lets you turn away and this is an unflinching short novel that should make you think a lot about technology, capitalism and colonialism, and which will haunt you long after you have finished it.
  4. Jeff Noon continued on his idiosyncratic way this year with Within Without. The latest of his existential SF detective series featuring John Nyquist takes place in the city of Delerium, which is fractured by a thousand borders, all of which have to be traversed in different ways and whose thousands of micro-states all have different qualities and rules. It is somewhat reminscent of China Miéville’s The City and The City, but like Creeping Jenny, the previous novel in the Nyquist series, this one has a retro-British feel. Howecer, rather than Wicker Man-type rural horror, this one has the specifically tired, postwar ambience of 1950s London, centred around the lost (sentient!) image of rock’n’roll star, Vince Craven, and the gritty world of popular entertainment.
  5. Klara and the Sun, by (we have to say this now) the Nobel-Prize-winning, Kazuo Ishiguro, is about robots. Klara, Ishiguro’s robot, is also sentient, but in the limited way of a prodigious 5-year-old child. ‘She’ is bought by a family to be a companion to their daughter, who grows up with her then away from her. Klara’s consciousness is centred around a solar mythology, a useful mythology because she is powered by the sun. Like many of Ishiguro’s works, this book is suffused by sadness and things are never quite as the protagonists’ believe. It’s not his best, but that’s relative!
  6. A Master of Djinn by P. Djélì Clark is a rip-roaring steampunk-meets-Arabic mythology adventure, the first full length novel (after two excellent novellas) featuring the estimable, Fatma el-Sha’award, investigator for the Cairo division of Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, lover of finely tailored suits, and fine women. It’s this latter quality plus the defiant anti-colonialism of the plot which presumably caused one dim reviewer to claim the book was ruined by “woke virtue signalling” – ha ha! Well, if you like your “woke virtue signalling” with added angels, djinn, secret societies, over-elaborate weapons and threats to the world as we (don’t) know it, then you’ll love this. I did.
  7. Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild Built, is also about robots, the first of a new series (Monk and Robot), and is SF balm for the soul. It is a beautiful, meandering, throughtful novel which follows an errant monk in a utopian world, where robots long ago disappeared into the wilderness promising to ‘check in’ some time, who discovers his new mission in an encounter with a ‘wild-built’ robot. Nothing much happens, but it happens wonderfully (but see also my Disappointments of the Year, below).
  8. Tade Thompson’s Far from the Light of Heaven is a really strong locked room murder-mystery set on a supposedly infallible AI-driven spaceship. Among other things, it features a selfish tech multi-billionaire (take your pick of who they could be modelled on…), a troubled investigator, a Nigerian-run space-station… oh, and a wolf. I couldn’t help comparing this to Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, and it stands the comparison very well, although perhaps it isn’t such a virtuoso effort as Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy (Rosewater et al.). But, if you will go setting such high standards…
  9. Finally, two sequels. The first was Invisible Sun, by Charles Stross, which wrapped up his dimension-skipping Merchant Princes sequence nicely (for now), but with maybe a little too much backgrounding / info-dumping for my tastes. Still, I liked this recent trilogy enough that I went back and read the whole sequence from the start, and it hangs together like almost no other decades-spanning project in SFF. As a complete work, it is an amazing achievement.
  10. Finally, there was Nicky Drayden’s Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis. Nicky Drayden appears to be a bit of niche author, but she should be much more widely read. This novel tied up the themes developed in Escaping Exodus very well, with a satisfying resolution to the question of whether our protagonists can live sustainably, and without cruelty and destruction, inside the gigantic spacefaring beetles which they have colonized / infested. The parallels with our dilemmas on Earth are obvious, are here we back with same themes as Monica Byrne and Claire North (and Le Guin) in all ways, with fluid gender and sexual identities and the difficulties of building utopia.

Finally, I have to say there were some disappointments this year. In crime, I had been really looking forward to Andrea Camilleri’s Riccardino, the final Montalbano novel. But it turned out that it wasn’t really the final novel sequentially, it was a manuscript from a while back that Camilleri had written, it seems, as a bit of an experiment and to express some frustrations, and then put aside. Now published post-mortem, it uses the gimmick which Camilleri had already played with in a short-story of having the detective realise he’s in a story and able to communicate with the author. This is just tiresome and undermines the story, which itself isn’t up to much anyway and is mostly a kind of broad religious farce, far more like Camilleri’s historical writing than the rest of the sequence. This isn’t the only bad Montalbano novel, but it is a unworthy memorial to a fine writer.

In SFF, I was highly recommded to read S.B. Divya’s Machinehood. The author is someone I admire as an editor and the themes seemed interesting, but I just couldn’t get very far into it due to the unengaging writing and what seemed to be a story that consisted mostly of people running and shooting. This isn’t any kind of definitive view because I not only did I not finish it (very unusual for me), I barely started it, so maybe I’ll try again sometime.

And then there was Becky Chambers. She’s on my Top 10 (see above), but she also wrote another novel, The Galaxy and the Ground Within, which is set in the Wayfarers universe and to which I had a very different reaction. I have loved all of the previous novels in this sequence, but here Chambers seems to be pushing the envelope of her general inclination to produce ‘nice’, positive, relationship-centred SF, with a novel that has no plot of speak of, characters who have quirks rather than qualities, and where everything is solved by cake (no, I mean this quite literally). It’s so sugar-sweet that it should come with a health warning, and so twee that it makes me cringe just thinking about it. Nothing much happens, but you really start to wish for a comet to come, or an intergalactic war, or even just some mild peril. It’s one thing to want to provide a counterbalance to all that dark and dystopian SF, but utopianism still needs intelligence and interest and, not to mention, drama: see Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, or yes, Becky Chambers’ other work. There’s a line somewhere between the optimistic and wholesome vibe of the rest of the Wayfarers sequence, or indeed the gentle thoughtfulness of A Psalm for the Wild Built, and the relentless, insufferable kitsch of The Galaxy and the Ground Within. No more cake for me, thank-you.

My Top 5 Academic Books of 2021

I’ve bought a lot of books this year and read… many of them. Almost all of them were not, directly speaking, surveillance books. I’m a bit bored of surveillance and privacy books at this point. That’s no reflection on my colleagues, just that I’ve been off in other places. I’ve been reading a lot about planetarity and extraplanetarity (space!), and I’ve been going back to reading more environmental writing. This used to be my field (I have an MSc in environmental management) and I used to teach in this area, as well as having been an eco-activist for many years. I’m trying to put surveillance, environmental and (extra)planetarity together in various ways right now and these are the things that have been making me think.

  1. My favourite book, by a long way, was David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (Signal, 2021). Completed just before Graeber’s untimely death which robs us of one of our most free-ranging and unencumbered thinkers, this books challenges almost everything we thought we knew about why things are the way they are and how they got this way. The first chapter on how indigenous North American thinkers influenced the enlightenment is stunning enough in itself, but each chapter that follows brings rigorously contrarian arguments, which take down the superficial approaches of populist writers (like Harari and Pinker et al.) along the way.
  2. I read two books on extraterritoriality and space this year and they are both in my Top 3. Daniel Deudney’s extraordinary Dark Skies (Oxford, 2020) is the weightier and more theoretically dense, but no less enthralling and a real kick-in-the-teeth for the Elon Musks of this world who think we can live on Mars.
  3. Much shorter and more fun, but still highly enlightening, is Fred Sharmen’s Space Forces (Verso, 2021), which offers a breezily-written history of how we have understood the possibility of life in space, as well as how it has been tried so far.
  4. Peter Drahos comes from a totally different background to me (Business / Management), but his book, Survival Governance (Oxford, 2021) offers a challenging argument on how the solution to the climate crisis will have to come from the Chinese state – or humanity as a whole will have no future. It’s not a blame-thesis: Drahos is simply acknowledging the dual political and economic power that the Chinese empire will have in the coming century: if nothing more radical happens in the meantime (see below…), China will be the only major power able to direct the transformation that is needed, whatever we think about China otherwise.
  5. Alternatively, a bracing little manifesto, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, from Andreas Malm (Verso, 2021) suggest a more direct approach. This reminded me of where I came from and what we may need to do, sooner rather than later, in the emergency in which we now find ourselves.

Finally, my bonus read was the long overdue reissue of the one of the most important founding works in surveillance studies, Oscar Gandy’s The Panoptic Sort (Oxford, 2021). Gandy is of course well-known within surveillance studies and has already been recognised with the Outstanding Contribution Award by the Surveillance Studies Network, but is only now being rediscovered outside as a precursor of almost all the work on algorithmic and data bias, ethics and accountability – and this by a scholar of colour in the early nineties. The new edition is enhanced by a new introduction and afterword by Oscar, who remains one of the most delightful, as well as insightful, people who I have met in academia.

There were also some really disappointing and bad books I read this year, but the less said about them, the better…