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Return to the Current Issue Index
This paper describes the development of a vast bureaucracy of surveillance by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), Canada, and the categories employed in a vast social sorting operation of drinkers undertaken from 1927 into the 1960s. The paper deals fundamentally with list-making and its social consequences. These social sorts could transform the most private interests into public matters, recategorizing individuals and redefining their material possessions and property. However the Ontario “drunk list” was also known as the “Indian list” and the story of the LCBO is also the story of how the politics of race become diabolical. This paper thus exposes the georacial profiling of First Nations populations of the northern region and the bureaucratic reinscription of identity by means of then new technologies that enabled specific forms of social sorting: the folding together of lists, supported by inter-institutional cooperation through data provision across sectors, toward the pre-elimination of populations from the ranks enjoying legal access to alcoholic products.
Kevin Walby - Little England? The rise of open-street Closed-Circuit Television surveillance in Canada Social monitoring is often explained in terms of top-down or hierarchal forms of power, which is reflected in the reliance on neo-Marxist and disciplinary society analytical frameworks in contemporary studies of open-street closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance. Established surveillance theories cannot account for instances when citizens themselves seek out regulatory measures in their own communities. Community schemes can precede and inform police policy. Drawing from developments in the sociology of governance, I examine media coverage, government document and questionnaire data regarding the rise of open-street CCTV schemes in Canadian cities, demonstrating empirically how regulation through CCTV surveillance can be generated from above (e.g. police, state), the middle (e.g. business entrepreneurs), and below (e.g. moral entrepreneurs and civic governance). Offering four suppositions that act as a pragmatic framework for understanding the rise of open-street CCTV in Canada, this article is a partial corrective to the reigning theoretical explanations regarding how regulatory projects like open-street CCTV are generated.
John Flint - Surveillance and exclusion practices in the governance of access to shopping centres on periphery estates in the UK The UK government has renewed its focus upon retail crime in deprived neighbourhoods. This paper discusses the roles of cities as sites of consumption and places the growth of surveillance and techniques of exclusion in shopping centres within wider trends towards the privatisation of public space. The paper seeks to explore the spatial, social and political relations revealed through studies of the surveillance and exclusionary mechanisms, including banning orders, deployed in shopping centres located on periphery estates in two Scottish cities. It identifies the tensions and synergies arising from the dualities of these centres as sites of consumption and civic engagement, examines the specific dynamics arising from the particular community contexts of the centres and explores how practices of surveillance impact on various dimensions of social exclusion.
Shane Dawson - The impact of institutional surveillance technologies on student behaviour
Contemporary education institutions are increasingly investing fiscal and human resources to further develop their online infrastructure in order to enhance flexible learning options and the overall student learning experience. Coinciding with the implementation of these technologies has been the centralisation of data and the emergence of online activities that have afforded the capacity for more intimate modes of surveillance by both the institution and education practitioner. This study offers an initial investigation into the impact of such modes of surveillance on student behaviours. Both internal and external students surveyed indicated that their browsing behaviours, the range of topics discussed and the writing style of their contributions made to asynchronous discussion forums are influenced by the degree to which such activities are perceived to be surveyed by both the institution and teaching staff. The analyses deriving from this data are framed within Foucault’s works on surveillance and self governance. This paper discusses the implications of this new mode of governance for learning and teaching and suggests areas of further investigations.
This article is based upon an analysis of the commonalities between CCTV and television. Although this article is not meant to contribute to media studies as a science, it will nonetheless use empirical data from diverse TV shows, time periods and regions to show the decisive role television plays in public acceptance and implementation of public surveillance technology, as well as in the construction of suspicion. Additionally, this article considers the technological similarities of CCTV and television by using TV data as a source of ethnographic material to understand the discriminating nature of visual surveillance technologies.
Chad Harris - The Omniscient Eye: Satellite Imagery, “Battlespace Awareness,” and the Structures of the Imperial Gaze This paper explores the role of aerial and satellite imagery in the US military’s command, control, and intelligence (C4I) systems, with an historical focus on the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Using satellite imagery for military intelligence and warfare is part of an ongoing effort in the US Department of Defense to make all cartographic and topographic space, and the objects in it, totally visible and “transparent,” what the US military calls “total battlespace awareness.” It is where imagery production is attached to concrete and purposive action in the abstract realm of “battlespace,” an example of how the mundane and the monstrously violent intersect around the production of visual data and artefacts. Borrowing a metaphor from Paul Edwards, I suggest that satellite imagery can not only “open up” the world (making it transparent), but can also “close down” geographical space under a regime of surveillance and violent military control. The discursive power of aerial and satellite imagery is derived from its position as an objectifying transcendent gaze, above and beyond subjectivity (Donna Haraway’s “God Trick”), and when these images are disseminated in the mass media as testaments to military prowess, they become visual representations of geographical domination (as in Denis Cosgrove’s “Apollonian Eye”). In this sense, satellite imagery, photo reconnaissance, and imagery interpretation are rich sites and artefacts for exploring how power and national sovereignty turn on the visual.
Dominique Perault - Community life in Colombia under the surveillance of extreme right paramilitary organizations This article examines the ways in which surveillance mechanisms implemented by the paramilitaries (AUC) in certain regions of Colombia have contributed to the establishment of specific forms of social interactions. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the permanent surveillance to which the population is subjected, conditions the ways that people establish contact and communicate with one another, and undermines the construction of the stable references necessary for community life.
