Tracked: Critical Surveillance Studies

This graduate seminar investigates historical and contemporary technologies and practices of surveillance, drawing on the established field of Surveillance Studies as well as relevant literature in performance studies, media ethnography, software/platform studies, sociology of labor, and history of science. We will address confluences of moving bodies, disciplining technologies, and state power: for example, motion-sensing systems operating at scales ranging from individual fitness trackers to drone monitoring of refugee movements. Key topics include sousveillance, dataveillance/data bodies, racialized surveillance, algorithmic bias, surveillance art, and surveillance capitalism.