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Cultures of Surveillance

6/10/2011

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Guest blog by Dr David Barnard-Wills, Research Fellow in the Department of Informatics and Systems Engineering, Cranfield University.

In a moment of serendipity I find myself sitting down to write a report about a conference I recently attended at UCL, whilst also reading an editorial published yesterday, both of which address congruent topics - surveillance and culture.

The conference was the 'Cultures of Surveillance' hosted by the Autopsies Group at UCL. It ran from the evening of Thursday 29th September  through to the evening of Saturday 1st October. (website here). There were keynotes from Tom Gunning (which I sadly missed) and from Simon Cole. Cole engaged with the mythology of the 'CSI' effect, finding little actual evidence for the supposed threat to the US juridical system by the television viewing habits of its population, but rather a large institutional perception of a problem and a number of responses. What was fascinating was the way that the media appeared to be adopting the critical stance of public understanding of science scholars.

The conference was diverse, although with a leaning towards the humanities. You can see this diversity from the programme. There were presentations on photojournalism, visibility in court houses (both architecturally and increasingly through mobile phone cameras), the media presentation of judges, performance in espionage, surveillance and art, public images of Guantanamo Bay, the Ring of Steel in London, house numbering, German census boycotts, the sociological 'mass observation project' and several other topics. There was even a delivered-over-video presentation from David Lyon on 'surveillance cultures' (which you can see here). My own contribution was an attempt to look at the way that surveillance studies has drawn upon visual cultural approaches (art theory, photojournalism, art practice) and the ways that it can get stuck within a visual trap.

One of the questions repeatedly asked at various points during the conference was 'is this surveillance?' or 'how can we tell if this is surveillance or not?' Part of this may well be the sort of inclusion/exclusion activity that can mark interdisciplinary fields ("I'm fairly sure I'm working on surveillance, I'm not entirely sure that you are"). There certainly is a place for conceptual clarity on the way that surveillance is used, but I think there's been plenty of this within surveillance studies, which would be useful. I'm cautious about essentialist definitions, but rather see 'surveillance' as a conceptual concept that we can apply to practices in the world (or to elements of cultural products) as an analytical lens. That said, I've got a soft spot for surveillance as 'political epistemology'.

The editorial for a special section of Sociological Quarterly, by Torin Monahan is 'Surveillance as Cultural Practice'. I contributed a paper to this section, which looks at the ways surveillance is represented and discussed in the UK print news media, as well as making an argument about the importance of language in understanding surveillance (available behind a journal paywall here). I'd like to raise the editorial in the context of the UCL conference, because it speaks to several of things I thought about during the event. Torin suggests that cultural studies of surveillance might be better placed to embrace reflexivity, and to be part of a useful expansion of the field beyond what he sees as its origins within sociological approaches and a focus upon institutional power dynamics. The article traces one version of the trajectory of surveillance studies, and it is a version which might well be useful to conference participants. The list of references would also be of particular use.

The conference also left me thinking about research methods across disciplines, and in particular how this might affect a 'transdisciplinary enterprise' as Monahan calls surveillance studies. I'm convinced that cultural depictions and representations of surveillance practices are meaningful and important. But I think I need to think more about the methodological ways to integrate that. I think I know how to do political discourse analysis, and feel comfortable looking at the way groups talk or write about a practice such as surveillance. I don't quite yet know how to integrate the analysis of a film in terms of surveillance. To what extent does this privilege the perspective of a particular director, and if it does, why are we privileging that over somebody who does not have the cultural and financial resources to produce art? I suspect there might be resources within film studies to help me answer that. It's the sort of debate a discipline has with itself, but that might not be the sort of thing an 'outsider' looking to that discipline for inspiration would encounter.

I'm encouraged by the spread of the concept of surveillance throughout a range of academic networks. Over the last couple of years I've been to conferences on surveillance where I didn't know most of the academics there, and its been exciting. I think it speaks to the purchase the concept has been getting in public life over recent years. Surveillance is a concern, but also potentially a paradigm. The other side of this diversity is that for many papers at such events, the particular work presented is often the author's first (and sometimes sadly last) engagement with surveillance. Without wanting to play at disciplinary gate-keeper (and not actually being able to) the danger is that such contributions tap up against the edges of the body of surveillance studies literature, appropriate the panopticon, or perhaps the synopticon, quote David Lyon, and then return to their own disciplinary home. Surveillance studies carries quite a few concepts and ideas that would be helpful - for example the discussions over the meaning of surveillance. My response would never be to exclude or disregard these contributions, because they've not read all the papers I've read. I think the role that those of us for whom surveillance is a core interests can play is to point such contributions towards those particular ideas and concepts that would help them the most. That requires engagement and participation. My suspicion is that this works in both directions.

So my thanks to the conference organisers, for some movement in that direction - (and also for the lunches, the lunches were pretty good).
 

David Barnard-Wills


Re-posted with permission from Surveillance and Identity.

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Besides the Screen International Seminar

2/11/2010

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The Autopsies Group Work of Film project is interested in this international seminar on 'all modes of cinema that are not film.'

See this website for more information about the forthcoming Besides the Screen International Seminar held at Goldsmiths, University of London, on 20-21 November 2010, and for details of how to register.



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Joint symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London

1/11/2010

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See here for information about the forthcoming joint symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London on 27-28 November 2010. Prof. Beatriz Colomina will give the key-note address on 'Multi-screen architecture' at the first event, organised by the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.





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Objects--What Matters? Conference, Manchester

14/9/2009

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Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) Annual Conference

"Objects--What Matters? Technology, Value and Social Change," 1-4 September 2009, Manchester

CRESC is an ESRC-funded international research center bringing together Manchester University and Open University academics from disciplines as diverse as Accounting and Finance, Business, Census and Survey Statistics, Geography, History, Media Studies, Social Anthropology and Sociology to analyze socio-cultural change. The centre's research is separated into four themes, and this year's conference was put together by Theme 4, 'Cultural Values and Politics,' and focused on objects. (http://www.cresc.ac.uk/research/theme4/index.html)

The academic planning committee, consisting of Penny Harvey (University of Manchester), Hannah Knox (University of Manchester), Elizabeth Silva (Open University), Nick Thoburn (University of Manchester) and Kath Woodward (Open University), put together panels on 'Artefactual Pleasures', 'The Materiality of the Image and Knowledge', 'Objects, Art and Time' among many others, and each panel was based in different disciplines. Travelling between rooms, I was confronted with wildly different approaches to objects, a panel of art and cultural historians might contest whether a machine could be classed as an object, while another comprised of
sociologists and anthropologists might refer to something as diffuse as the BSE crisis as an 'object'. How these different disciplinary approaches complemented and clashed with each other was one of the major challenges
facing both panels and audiences. Keynote speakers included philosopher Graham Harman, sociologist Patricia
Clough, art historian Griselda Pollock, philosopher Annemarie Mol and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. Pollock's paper on 'Sarah Kofman's Father's Pen: Trauma, Transmission and the Strings of Virtuality between
the Psychoanalytical and the Aesthetic Understanding of the Object as Link not Lost' was particularly moving, analyzing the object's role as focus for memory, a subject explored further in two panels addressing 'Objects
and Memory'. Artists, curators and art historians took part in 'The Object Research Lab' which sought to allow the audience to interact with a set of 'neutral' blob shaped objects brought along by the artists and to respond to a number of questions about their interactions. Curator, Dieter Roelstrate, discussed 'Thing Theory' with artist Yvonne Droge Wendel. Yvonne Droge Wendel's (http://www.yvonnedrogewendel.nl/index.html) work engages with things, be they sticks, pieces of furniture or broken down cars. Roelstrate has recently curated an exhibition on 'The Thing' as part of a larger event 'All that is solid Melts into Air' in Mechelen. ( http://www.muhka.be/toont_beeldende_kunst_detail.php?la=en&id=2807 ).
Both discussed the differences between objects and things and grappled with whether objects can speak or listen, and when and how they die. Peter Buse of Salford University spoke on the fast dying media of polaroids in his paper, 'Polaroid Mosaics: On Photographic Tiles'. He has recently finished working on an AHRC project on 'Polaroid Cultures'. Artist Hilary Jack (http://www.hilaryjack.com/) both exhibited and spoke at the conference. She also works with dead objects. She collects broken umbrellas, discarded and broken jewelry, repairs them and then puts them back where she found them. She recently took part in an exhibition at Manchester's Castleford Gallery entitled 'The Social Lives of objects'
( http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Archive.asp?eKey=310&eP=2 ).
Another paper of particular interest was anthropologist Nicole Vitellone's on 'Just Another Night in the Shooting Gallery'? The Syringe, Affect and Space' which studied the social life of the syringe through an ethnographic study of heroin users and their relationships with the syringe. These different disciplinary encounters with objects demonstrated how, and why we should, study the object and specifically the object's death.

Abstracts of all the papers can be found at  http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/conference2009/documents/ABSTRACTSCRESCCONFERENCE2009FINAL.doc

--Karolina Kendall-Bush, 14 September 2009
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