Suchergebnisse

Globalization, Technological Change, and Public Education documents the dramatic changes taking place in public education through the incorporation of new information technologies. These additions to the public school environment have generally been seen as enabling tools to help students and nations compete in the global marketplace. Yet a closer look at the interplay of technological change and organizational restructuring suggests the emergence of new, less promising power relations. Through detailed ethnographic research and interviews in the Los Angeles public school system, Torin Monah

This essay reflects on the many upheavals of the past year and their implications for critical scholarship on surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic, anti-science policies, radicalized white supremacists, police killings of people of color, and the resurgence of the racial justice movement all inflect surveillance practices in the contemporary moment. In particular, today's polarized political landscape makes it difficult to condemn surveillance in the service of the public good, but irrespective of one's goals or intentions, the embrace of transparency carries its own risks. Transparency, and scientific vision more broadly, is an extension of the Enlightenment and subsequent scientific revolution, which from the start sought to advance knowledge and consolidate white power through the violent subjugation of nature, women, and racial minorities. One fundamental risk of valorizing transparency is that doing so occludes the ways that relations of domination are indelibly encoded into surveillance systems and practices. Given this, I argue that the project of decolonizing surveillance inquiry should now be our primary focus as a field.

Modern surveillance systems operate upon masculine logics of disembodied control at a distance. As such, they artificially abstract bodies, identities, and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure and aggravate gender and other social inequalities. This article explores the gender dimensions of surveillance systems in several public domains: welfare, healthcare, and transportation. By exposing the dominant rationalities of such systems and critiquing the discourses that support them, one can challenge the supposed neutrality of such technologies and question the power relations to which they give rise. The goal of this article, therefore, is to introduce a new line of inquiry into gender and surveillance, one that perceives surveillance as operating on the level of abstraction but with embodied effects for women and men.