Watching both ways
by Emma van der Tak – “I saw that you have written for newspapers before,” Albert remarks as the waitress puts down our coffee. While I did so…
Tag: surveillance
Policing Patients – review
In Policing Patients, Elizabeth Chiarello examines the role of prescription drug monitoring programmes (PDMPs) in the opioid crisis in the US, arguing that they transform healthcare into patient…
Suk-Young Kim on her book, Millennial North Korea
https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/millennial-north-korea Haeeun Shin: Could you share about your intellectual trajectory of Millennial North Korea? What triggered you to have an interest…
Challenging Normalized Surveillance: “Birds on the Wire” Surveillance in Mexico
There are Birds on the Wire In Mexican slang, “hay pájaros en el alambre” (there are birds on the wire), is an expression used to imply that a…
To Witness: Cell Phone Cameras, Immigrant Communities, and Police Accountability
“There is nothing like an iPhone …to show people the problem…” -Alex Vitale, The End of Policing An ACLU volunteer hangs informational posters in downtown Houston. The top…
Premediations of Carcerality: Notes on Targeted Surveillance in Postcolonial India
This post explores the surveillance of letters across two time-periods in postcolonial India: mail letter interception immediately following India’s independence in 1947, and the contemporary use of l…
Staring Contest
It’s 3 in the morning. I’m sitting at the end of the hallway of the boomerang-shaped intensive care unit (ICU) where I work, looking into the darkness beyond…
Violence/Freedom: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance in Public Parks
Cities all over the world have witnessed a surge in the use of surveillance technologies, such as data-gathering phone apps, facial recognition software, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras…
“Emeryville is Weird”
When I would tell people I worked in the small San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Emeryville, they would almost always say, “Emeryville is weird.” And then the…
Digital Psychedelia: Hidden Experience and the Challenge of Paranoia by Tehseen Noorani
Introduction Over the past 15 years, several groups of researchers have sought to use clinical trials to reintroduce psychedelics to mainstream society, reporting impressive efficacy from trials a…
The Pandemic Narrative and the War Against the People: Day 2 of an Online Interdisciplinary Symposium
Friday, July 30, 2021 was Day #2 of an online international and interdisciplinary symposium organized by Doctors for Covid Ethics (see the report for Day #1). The symposium…
In the Journals – Militarization
Officers wearing a traditional late 1960s uniform (left) and a new demilitarized uniform featuring a blazer (right), Riverside County Sheriff, 1969 by Stuart Schrader via Journal of Urban…
Lettre à Madame la Maire
Le 4 janvier 2021 English Version Madame la Maire, Si je vous écris aujourd’hui, c’est pour vous faire part de ma tristesse, et de mon indignation.…
Envisioning a Different Park: Border Walls, Transborder Ties, and Militarized Ecologies
When news broke out on January 20th, 2021, that newly inaugurated President Joe Biden signed a proclamation ending Trump’s Executive Order 9844, which declared a national emergency at…
Indian Food Delivery Networks During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Over the past decade, the concept of the gig economy has gained momentum in academic discourse. Often linked to temporary employment created by multinational technological corporations through digital…
Quantum Arms Race
A lot has been said and written about the impending unleashing of quantum technology in the world. Whereas many sing paeans to the potential of the technology to…
STS and Electoral Politics
In the context of the upcoming US presidential election and increasing evidence of the importance of voting infrastructure, this week we revisit past posts that highlight the key…
40: Quarantine & The Origins of Computation
Quarantine is a number. Quarantine was the name given to the strategy of isolating potentially harmful populations for forty days in an effort to impede potential dangers. Deriving…
Surveillant Materialities of Migrant (Im)mobility: Reconceptualizing Border Technologies
After lunch on the day I arrived at Casa Begoña Migrant Shelter in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, México, Doña Paquita, a shelter director, came to fetch me from the comedor,…
A Place Apart by Benjamin Hegarty
On a crisp autumn day in April in Melbourne, my phone has several missed calls from an Indonesian friend. With a heavy heart, I call back to see…
Citizen surveillance and social media during South Africa’s lockdown
Surveillance has become a common concern in public debates, but it is usually associated with the power of tech corporations to surveil people through algorithms. In the book…
Managing Refugee Mobilities: Global Flows of Migration Deterrence Technologies
In 2000, a United Nations Resolution designated June 20th World Refugee Day. In the week leading up to this day, countries throughout the world pay homage to the…
‘Dynamic Totalities’: Data Surveillance as a Paradigm
In the zeitgeist of academia, surveillance has clearly an ominous connotation. However, is surveillance not fundamentally a way of looking? More formally, a way of looking at totalities.…
Practices, knowledge, and the next pandemic: a lesson from a failed participatory public health intervention by Alejandro Cerón
My time doing public health work in Guatemala in the 1990s and early 2000s has shaped how I think about emergencies. Working for an underresourced health system, my…