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 Research Program

As a sociologist who specializes in surveillance studies, I am interested to make surveillance, in its many guises, more visible. I seek to illustrate how surveillance processes mitigate or aggravate historical and structural forms of inequality. This involves both empirically based, descriptive analysis and theoretically nuanced critical engagement.

Core Project

My SSHRC-funded doctoral dissertation, which is titled Picturing Public Health Surveillance: Tracing the Material Dimensions of Information in Ontario’s Public Health System, draws from literatures in the sociology of  information, communication & technology, socio-legal studies, science & technology studies, and the sociology of health & illness. It critiques the dominant conception of information in social scientific, public health and medical care discourse, and empirically explores the increasing integration of large-scale information technology (IT) into public health surveillance practice in order to clarify several of the uncertain trade-offs that attend the informationization of public health. By focusing my analysis on the material dimensions of public health information, I identified a process of systemic marginalization whereby local concerns – for instance those of patients and front-line public health workers – were being subordinated to the effort to centralize disease surveillance in the province.

I aim to further explore such processes in a book, entitled Viropolitics, which will emerge from and extend my doctoral research. This book will critically engage two developments:  1) the emergence, expansion, and refinement of HIV-testing technologies (and practices); and 2) the increasing criminalization of HIV-positive status. While there is not a direct relationship between these developments per se, their coincidence is symptomatic of a new politics of public health – a viropolitics – that is increasingly preoccupied with ‘emerging’ infectious disease, preparedness, securitization, and global surveillance.

Allied Projects

My doctoral work links to, supports, and is informed by other allied research projects that engage surveillance from a sociological perspective. Along one axis I have been interested to understand medical surveillance. This axis connects with a further axis of research concerned with the exercise of police surveillance. These lines of research have multiple points of intersection; both illuminate the role of surveillance in the exercise of knowledge and power. 

Beneath the rubric of my research on medical surveillance, I am undertaking research into the construction and use of bio-banks for commercially driven biotechnological innovation.* Bio-banks form part of the medical surveillance assemblage and, in the so-called post-genomic era, they represent an increasingly central site for the production of medical knowledge. Building on the work of surveillance studies scholars like David Lyon and Irma van der Ploeg, I am seeking to further develop scholarship on the relation between bio-banking and surveillance.

Beneath the rubric of my research on police surveillance, I am concerned with the way people experience such surveillance, and how it shapes or constrains their capacity for political engagement. In particular, I have contributed to surveillance studies and socio-legal studies literature an analysis of the broader implications of overt surveillance for those who are politically marginal (in Social & Legal Studies). I build on this work in a forthcoming analysis of surveillance in the lead-up to the 2010 Winter Olympics, in Vancouver, and in an analysis of the 2005 shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes.

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* I wish to acknowledge the support of Dr. Fiona Miller, with the Department of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation, who is a close collaborator on this project, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), for making this project possible.