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States engaged in the war on terror have pursued war-time domestic security policies, as reflected by special anti-terror legislation enacted, for instance, in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Taking Canada as a case study, this article argues that the pursuit of these policies exacerbates existent racial fissures in the social body. Using elements of Giorgio Agamben's theory of the state of exception as an analytical framework, this article interprets empirical interview and survey data, as well as the Canadian government's national security policy. It highlights some of the surveillance methods used by Canadian security forces and concludes that the convergence of these methods with the spectacle of extraordinary detention evinces a shift towards totalitarianism. For some, it is not the conditions of parliamentary democracy that constitute the backdrop of political life, but the conditions of the detention camp.

Slot machines are recognized as a particularly risky form of gambling. However, there is a form of slot machine consumption that seems to have largely escaped the notice of regulators and scholars: the streaming of slot machine play on YouTube and other platforms. In this article, we present the results of our qualitative study of 21 slot machine videos. Our study examines how these videos portray gambling and how they align with the norms of YouTube's platform economy. Our analysis underscores the representation of slot machine gambling in this under-regulated media, emphasizing different tactics of viewer manipulation. We introduce the concept of interpassive gambling to reflect the ways that user-generated videos are a form of diffusion of gambling mechanics beyond traditional gambling venues. We conclude by calling for more scholarly and regulatory attention to this gamblified site of media consumption.

AbstractThis article considers contemporary developments in public health intelligence (PHI), especially their focus on health events of pandemic potential. It argues that the sociological study of PHI can yield important insights for the sociology of pandemics. PHI aims to detect health events as (or evenbefore) they unfold. Whilst its apparatuses envelope traditional public health activities, such as epidemiological surveillance, they increasingly extend to non‐traditional public health activities such as data‐mining in electronically mediated social networks. With a focus on non‐traditional PHI activities, the article first situates the study of PHI in relation to the sociology of public health. It then discusses the conceptualisation and actualisation of pandemics, reflecting on how public health professionals and organisations must equip themselves with diverse allies in order to realise the claims they make about pandemic phenomena. Finally, using the analytic tools of actor‐network theory, sites for future empirical research that can contribute to the sociology of pandemics are suggested.

This article provides an introduction to a special issue of Body & Society that explores the surveillance--embodiment nexus. It accentuates both the prevalence and consequence of bodies being increasingly converted into 'objects of information' by surveillance technologies and systems. We begin by regarding the normalcy of body monitoring in contemporary life, illustrating how a plurality of biometric scanners operate to intermediate the physical surfaces and subjective depths of bodies in accordance with various concerns. We focus on everyday experiences of bodily intermediation by surveillant dispositifs, and consider the broader political, epistemological, and ontological significance of these processes. We then point to the substantive intersections and divergences existing between body and surveillance studies. We conclude with an overview of the five articles appearing in this special issue. We describe how each contribution creates a template for imagining what a body is, and what a body might become, in a culture defined by proliferating data sharing behaviours, systems of codification, and practices of intermediation.

The transformation of games with the advent of platformized distribution systems continues to produce new and agile forms of consumption and exploitation. Valve Corporation's DOTA 2 is a key example of a gaming space that is constantly atomized and rebuilt with the aim of optimizing player participation. This participatory form is ever-more gamblified and framed by systems designed to habituate players to a new form of consumption. This article explores how DOTA 2 transforms every year with the advent of a yearly Battle Pass, brimming with gambling systems aimed at eliciting specific forms of user participation. We catalog and schematize these systems with the aim of shedding light on the inner workings of DOTA 2 during this season. The purpose of our work is to move the discussion beyond a regulatory focus on symptomatic loot boxes and toward a deeper understanding of the rhetorical systems hiding beneath game systems.

Gambling markets have drastically expanded over the past 35 years. Pacing this expansion has been the articulation of a governance framework that largely places responsibility for regulating gambling-related harms upon individuals. This framework, often defined with reference to the concept of responsible gambling (RG), has faced significant criticism, emphasizing public health and consumer protection issues. To study both the articulation and critique of the concept of responsible gambling, we conducted a 'scoping review' of the literature (Arksey & O'Malley 2005). Literature was identified through searches on academic databases using a combination of search terms. Articles were independently reviewed by two researchers. Findings indicate 142 publications with a primary focus on responsible gambling, with a high volume of publications coming from the disciplinary backgrounds of the first authors representing the fields of psychology, business, and psychiatric medicine. Further, publication key themes address topics such as responsible gambling tools and interventions, corporate social responsibility and accountability, responsible gambling concepts and descriptions, and to a lesser extent, critiques of responsible gambling. The scoping review of the literature related to responsible gambling suggests the need to foster research conditions to invite more critical and interdisciplinary scholarship in an effort to improve public health and consumer protection.

AbstractThis article examines Canada's first internet gambling website blocking scheme, which was enacted in Quebec as part of the implementation of the province's 2015 budget. Using qualitative research methods, the article illustrates the complexities of regulating online gambling. Influenced by critical sociological and anthropological studies of gambling, and taking a socio-legal, governmentality perspective, it shows how socio-legal studies can illuminate research on the regulation of gambling, and how the study of online gambling can, as a sentinel site for the regulation of online consumption, contribute to the development of socio-legal studies. Our analysis shows that the governmentality of online gambling is framed so as to exclude 1) a range of risks (e.g., related to consumer profiling and the capacity to stimulate "addictive consumption"), 2) the heterogeneity of everyday experience that connects online gambling with online addictive consumption more generally, and 3) a range of possibilities for governing online gambling otherwise.