To browse Academia. To investigate societal effects of different surveillance practices from a multi-disciplinary social science and legal perspective. Surveillance is a central organizing practice. Gathering personal data and processing them in searchable databases drives administrative efficiency but also raises questions about security, governance, civil liberties and privacy. Surveillance is both globalized in cooperative schemes, such as sharing biometric data, and localized in the daily minutiae of social life.
This innovative Handbook explores the empirical, theoretical and ethical issues around surveillance and its use in daily life. This Editor's Introduction discusses the interplay of surveillance issues with media and communication research.
The need for privacy protection against surveillance has assumed new significance due to the onslaught of technological developments that increasingly undermine the capacity of individuals to maintain anonymity in relation to public activities and their physical movements across public places.
They also call for active consideration of the full range of regulatory tools available and ways in which those tools can be adapted to reduce their existing limitations. This paper draws on a range of privacy resources, and on regulatory theory more generally, to suggest possible ways forward.
Surveillance Studies needs Gender and Sexuality. That is why this issue came into being. Although this is a comparatively short issue of Surveillance and Society, perhaps representing the fact that the critique of surveillance through these lenses is still in its infancy, its contributions highlight some of the ways in which studies of gender and sexuality are fundamental to mounting a critique of surveillance.
