What is 'Surveillance Studies'?
The term ‘Surveillance Studies’ names an
emergent, interdisciplinary field of social scientific research. For an introduction to the field of surveillance
studies, see David Lyon’s (2007) Surveillance
Studies: An Overview. Several open-access articles on surveillance can be found in the surveillance studies journal, Surveillance & Society.
Why Study Public Health Surveillance from a Surveillance Studies Perspective?
Reflecting on 20th century histories of public health, Dorothy Porter observes that they have tended to fall into one of two categories. They have either been heroic or anti-heroic. Either they have linked the institutionalization of public health to the chronologically imagined growth of rationalism, science and technology or they have viewed this institutionalization as a result of the reorganization and professionalization of medicine, and as part of and parcel of the development of ‘soft’ strategies for totalitarian control.
Porter asserts, however, that the institutionalization of public health “cannot be addressed as a monolithic march towards either inevitable progress or totalitarian repression” (1994: 5).* Porter makes this point to underscore the fact that the history of public health has multiple and often contradictory dimensions.
The same may be said of the history of public health surveillance. Although there are multiple tensions, interests, and local, material contexts that shape the practice of public health surveillance, it is not uncommon to find one-sided literature taking either a heroic or anti-heroic stance on the subject. Moreover, these stances commonly reflect disciplinary biases. While there are certainly exceptions, literature from a life science background has tended to regard public health surveillance in heroic terms. Conversely, literature from a social science background has tended to regard public health surveillance in anti-heroic terms.
To the extent that it is interdisciplinary, a surveillance studies approach provides a middle-ground between the heroic and anti-heroic approaches to public health surveillance. Ideally, a surveillance studies perspective is developed from empirically grounded assessments of public health surveillance practice.
A surveillance studies approach to public health surveillance is, today, increasingly important. In Canada and the United States, contemporary developments in public health surveillance are set against the backdrop of numerous apparent crises that characterize today’s inadequate medical-care systems. Against this backdrop, particular forms of large-scale, automated surveillance are increasingly taken up as ideal-typical solutions, embraced for their promise of a virtual (if not actual) public health system.
My dissertation empirically examined one such development in Ontario, Canada. On the basis of this examination, I am prompted to question whether contemporary investment in information technology (IT) and large-scale, IT-mediated surveillance - in the absence of a concomitant investment in public health human resources - is necessarily compatible with 'public health surveillance', and whether, in turn, such investment is in the interest of the public’s health._____
* Porter, Dorothy. 1994. “Introduction,” in The History of Public Health and the Modern State, Dorothy Porter (ed). Amsterdam: Rodopi.