[ecrea] CFP: Histories of the Surveillance Society

*CALL FOR PAPERS

Histories of the Surveillance Society: Transnational Contexts
Edited by Robert Heynen and Emily van der Meulen*

A growing number of scholars have argued that today we live in a 
‘surveillance society,’ suggesting that, especially with the spread of 
digital technologies, surveillance and data collection have become 
globally ubiquitous, driving everything from state security practices to 
consumer culture. This is the context for the emergence of the field of 
surveillance studies, which has expanded enormously over the past twenty 
years. But how new is this surveillance society? What are its 
dimensions, and how have they come into being internationally?

A small but expanding body of scholarship has traced important 
histories, showing that many surveillance practices are not as novel as 
sometimes thought. Indeed, important works have been published on 
histories of medical surveillance (Cartwright 1995; Fairchild et al. 
2007), surveillant criminology (Sekula 1986; Cole 2001; Finn 2009), and 
the emergence of practices of identification (Torpey 2000; Caplan & 
Torpey 2001; Groebner 2007; Bennett & Lyon 2008; About et al. 2013). We 
have also seen an opening up of perspectives from outside the European 
and Anglo-American worlds (Anderson 2004; McCoy 2009; Breckenridge 
2014), and from Indigenous perspectives (K. Smith 2009).

This collection seeks to further broaden and deepen these emerging 
historical perspectives, and to break new ground in thinking about how 
histories of surveillance have shaped modern social systems over the 
course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The approach of the volume is 
global, incorporating transnational perspectives and work from the 
global South. How has surveillance shaped the emergence of modern mass 
industrial societies, capitalism, and colonialism? What role have new 
media and information technologies played in this process? In what ways 
are various people and populations differentially targeted by and 
implicated in these surveillance practices?

We encourage submissions from scholars working in surveillance studies, 
but also those outside the field seeking to rethink their work through 
the lens of surveillance. We particularly encourage submissions that 
draw on critical literature engaging with gender, race and 
racialization, labour, disability, sexuality, and class.

Chapter topics may include, but are not limited to:

- The historical role of new media and information technologies (e.g., 
photography, film, databases) in the shaping of various global systems 
of surveillance

- The role of both state and non-state forms of surveillance in 
histories of intra- or transnational migration (e.g., identification 
systems, border control  mechanisms, status/non-status peoples)

- Histories of medical surveillance, including of specific diseases and 
blood borne viruses (e.g., tuberculosis, sexually transmitted 
infections), and the differential targeting of various bodies

- The constitution of disability through regimes of surveillance, 
including eugenic identifications, interventions, and regulations

- Cultural representations and engagements with surveillance, including 
but not limited to literature, film, visual art, and popular culture

- Capitalism, labour, and surveillance, in particular in relation to 
accumulation by dispossession, poor and vagrancy laws, workers and 
labour processes, and Marx’s and Marxist approaches

- State surveillance of political movements and dissidents (e.g., Red 
scares and anti-Communism, COINTELPRO, suppression of national 
liberation struggles, dirty wars in Latin America and elsewhere, dissent 
in the Eastern Bloc, surveillance in authoritarian states)

- The production of gendered subjects and the elaboration of gender 
binaries, including the policing and surveillance of queer, trans, and 
gender non-conforming bodies

- Histories of criminology, including the development of policing, 
growth of penal systems, and the extension of biometric practices (e.g., 
crainometry, physiognomy, fingerprinting)

- Surveillant strategies of colonial governance and the elaboration of 
racialized hierarchies, including colonial policing and military, labour 
exploitation, and settler practices

- Architecture, urban planning, and surveillance, in particular how 
these are shaped by the specific power dynamics at play in different 
global locations and historical periods

- Systems of identity and registration (e.g., the Koseki system in 
Japan, pass laws in South Africa and elsewhere, criminal registries of 
specific populations)

- Resistance, resilience, and responses to the various practices of 
surveillance outlined above, including how forms of counter-surveillance 
or sousveillance have been used in emancipatory social and political 
projects, and the role of surveillance in radical and revolutionary 
movements

*Abstract submission:*

Interested contributors should send a 300-400 word abstract and 100 word 
bio by November 10, 2016 to (Histories.Surveillance /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(Histories.Surveillance /at/ gmail.com)>. Notification of abstract 
acceptance will be December 15, 2016, and completed 6,000-8,000 word 
chapter drafts will be due by July 1, 2017.


*Book editors:*

Robert Heynen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of 
Communication Studies at York University, Canada. He is co-editor of 
'Expanding the Gaze: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance' 
(University of Toronto Press, 2016) and author of 'Degeneration and 
Revolution: Radical Cultural Politics and the Body in Weimar Germany' 
(Brill, 2015).

Emily van der Meulen is an Associate Professor in the Department of 
Criminology at Ryerson University, Canada. She is co-editor of 
'Expanding the Gaze: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance' 
(University of Toronto Press, 2016) and 'Selling Sex: Experience, 
Advocacy, and Research on Sex Work in Canada' (University of British 
Columbia Press, 2013).

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