Surveillance, Technology, and Capitalism

3 credits · Graduate

This class will explore the role of surveillance and technologies of monitoring and control in the world today. We will engage with debates about panopticism and privacy; social media and algorithimic amplification; e-commerce, data harvesting and platform capitalism; cyborgization and human/nonhuman configurations; labor rights and social protest under regimes of corporate and state surveillance; and changing assemblages of race, gender, citizenship and identity. Readings will range across feminist, Marxism and post-Marxism, STS, ethnographic explorations of precarity and the new economy, and literatures about digitality, finance, and biopolitics.