Context

Surveillance has become an increasingly central organizing principle in late-modern societies. As citizens and travelers, as employees and consumers, as individuals and collectivities, we are increasingly under surveillance, profiled by a range of technologies and a host of organizations that seek to structure our social relations. Although surveillance processes are deeply implicated in the exercise of knowledge and power, although they directly and indirectly shape our life chances and social mobility, they usually remain hidden from view in quotidian life. My goal is to make such processes more visible.


My Research Program

As a sociologist whose core area of specialization is concentrated in the field of Communication & Information Technology, I use qualitative methods to help empirically specify and critically assess the information-processing practices of organizations. With particular attention to vital politics, I draw from my sub-specialties in Surveillance Studies, Sociology of Health & Illness, Social & Legal Studies, and Science & Technology Studies to examine how information is used to shape and govern individual and social bodies.

Current Research*

Under the mentorship of Dr. Myra Hird, I am investigating how circuits of information traverse and connect the institutions of law and science. My empirical focus is upon public-health practice and how public-health professionals understand and navigate their sometimes incommensurate obligations to serve clients while protecting the broader population.

In addition to serving the pragmatic goal of highlighting and mobilizing innovative public-health practices, this research contributes to a broader understanding of what I have come to call viropolitics. Designating an emergent vital politics of public health, viropolitics are latent in those public-health practices and interventions that are (re)encoded for secondary and tertiary purposes. For example, when a patient’s case-management file – filled with information ostensibly meant to guide that patient’s counseling and treatment – is subpoenaed as evidence for a criminal trial concerning HIV non-disclosure, we witness a viropolitical (re)encoding of this information, as well as the practices and relationships that produced it in the first place.

On both pragmatic and critical-theoretic fronts, my research stems from postdoctoral work conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Fiona Miller, examining innovation, technology transfer and commercialization initiatives in healthcare organizations, as well as from my doctoral work on public-health surveillance, supervised by Dr. David Lyon, Dr. Myra Hird, Dr. Sergio Sismondo, and Dr. Jackie Duffin.

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* I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Strategic Research Training Initiative in Health Care Technology and Place for making my research possible.