Studies in Comparative Surveillance

Surveillance has long provoked a wide range of social responses, from the embrace of promises of security to a rejection of a threat to civil liberties. Why can some countries impose such social control while others cannot? Does this dynamic change when the monitoring is instead trans-national, be it in the form of more systemic logics of "surveillance capitalism" or of the new global tracking imperatives provoked by the current pandemic? This team-taught seminar in comparative surveillance studies will examine the complex cultural, political and techno-historical dimensions of new forms of social control in the Americas, Europe and Asia.