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- Convenors:
-
Deniz Yonucu
(Newcastle University)
Vita Peacock (King's College London)
Rune Steenberg (Palacky University in Olomouc)
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- Chair:
-
Deniz Yonucu
(Newcastle University)
- Discussant:
-
Catarina Frois
(ISCTE-IUL)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 01/002 CR & CC
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the range of methodological challenges raised by the ubiquitization of surveillance technologies across the world. How should anthropology adapt to this large-scale socio-technical transformation in the service of political hope?
Long Abstract:
We have been witnessing an unprecedented development of new surveillance technologies going hand-in-hand with the ever-increasing digitalisation of the past decade. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this transition, incentivising surveillance and paving the way for the use of experimental surveillance tools. Furthermore, the rise of 'participatory' surveillance enabled by the ubiquity of smartphones, fractures older analyses that view surveillance through the lens of clear power asymmetries, and opens up new questions around complicity and consent, as well as the potentials for subversion and resistance.
This panel explores the growing methodological challenges that this transformation raises for anthropology. We invite papers that consider these challenges conceptually or pragmatically. As anthropologists in the field of surveillance studies, we ask: how far can imported terms such as synopticism or dataveillance enable the work of ethnography, and how far can established frameworks be stretched? What innovative research tools can be used to study surveillance - whether technical applications or devices or new kinds of positionality? We also seek to consider fundamental questions about how this transformation alters the very conditions of anthropological knowledge production, foreclosing twentieth-century modalities and yielding novel ones, as well as posing new ethical dilemmas and existential risks.
In the light of this transformation the present becomes an important moment to refashion prevailing conditions in the service of political hope. How can ethnography amplify human efforts towards 'commoning' such as counter-surveillance, sousveillance, and digital counter-publics, that seek to disaggregate existing monopolies at this historical fork in the road?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Vita Peacock (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ongoing research with German data activists, this paper explores what it would mean to enact a non-surveillant anthropology, that attends to potentials for growth and change that can arrive with the experience of not being recorded.
Paper long abstract:
It is a commonplace to assert the overlaps between anthropology and surveillance, both in its human and technological form. This arises both from the unfounded accusations that anthropologists frequently experience (Verdery 2016), as well as the actual forms of collaboration with state surveillance that some anthropologists have chosen to pursue since the discipline’s beginning (Boas 1919, Price 2011, 2016). Meanwhile the technologies of surveillance that continue to entrench the positions of power-holders: developing historically from photography, audio-recording, to filming and now smartphone tracking (Favero and Theunissen 2018), are intrinsic to a multi-modal anthropology.
This paper drills into the differences. What would it mean to enact an anthropology—both at the research and dissemination phases—that rejects modes of documentation that serve as a medium and method of control, and which instead amplifies suppressed discourses and prises open alternative futures? A renewed consideration of documentation is also impelled in the anthropology of Europe by legal changes introduced by GDPR, and the ethics protocols implemented by the European research councils.
Drawing on fieldwork with anti-surveillance activists in Germany, I begin to sketch what a non-surveillant anthropology could be, in modes of engagement that go beyond the use of pseudonyms (McGranahan 2021), and include reflections on materiality, non-recording, and the use of data in the public domain. Using excerpts from the field, the paper offers that there are dimensions of growth and change associated with the experience of not being recorded, and anthropology can equally pursue this kind of living engagement.
Claire Dungey (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how surveillance technologies are used by children, parents and teachers in Germany, and how such technologies can be studied methodologically and ethically when children are restricted from mobile phone use, or when some surveillance technologies are banned in a legal context.
Paper long abstract:
Increasingly in an international context, parents, teachers, but also children themselves are using tracking technologies to monitor movements, sports activities and educational achievements. Such practices are often linked to fears of children's safety, ideas of 'good upbringing' or children's own desires to monitor progress. Yet such technologies also collect large amounts of data about children with unforeseeable future implications. In Germany, some technologies have been banned such as voice activated smart dolls, and children are taught about 'media competence' to protect themselves online.
Drawing on initial ethnographic data collected in Munich, Germany, this paper explores surveillance practices and processes that take place within and outside school institutions, and how an anthropologist can access this data ethically and sensitively especially when fieldnote data involves taking handwritten notes e.g. on children's movements or activities yet without tracking children's movements through app data. How do smart technologies enable more horizontal forms of surveillance – e.g. children tracking their peers, siblings, parents or teachers, or even the anthropologist?
The paper discusses questions of positionality, trust and access when exploring surveillance practices and media use in a school context as an adult researcher exploring both parent and child perspectives. In Bavaria, phones have been banned at schools, but rules are currently being relaxed, which is changing media practices. The paper considers innovate approaches to studying surveillance such as children or parents designing their ideal technologies for tracking achievements or movements. Moreover, the paper discusses how the least adult role might be beneficial as a researcher.
Karolina Kupinska (Xiamen University)
Paper short abstract:
Copying with school pressure parents in China use cameras to control their children studying. This paper invites discussion of socio - cultural consequences of this form of surveillance based on my fieldwork in Xiamen.
Paper long abstract:
As a person engaged in education in China I observe immense educational pressure students, parents and teachers face. One of many copying mechanisms parents employ is increased surveillance of their children.
In houses of middle class and middle upper-class Chinese, the use of cameras throughout the home has become commonplace. Although cameras surveilling children doing homework and studying were present prior to the outbreak of Covid, pandemic measures intensified the phenomena.
In my research I am looking at how the “panoptic eye” impacts social and cultural aspects of functioning and defining family. How does it change the relations and roles of parents and their studying children? How these cameras impact children’s understanding of themselves, family and society?
I am looking at these cameras as both a source and a consequence of Chinese society’s acceptance of CCTV surveillance as government’s tool of implementation of new regulations. Thus my objective is to examine the perceived efficiency of this “homework surveillance” by both parents and students and its impact on reaching the desired goals and how the goals are defined.
Finally I am looking at resistance strategies children use against the panoptic eye in their rooms. This overlaps with their understanding of privacy - which they experience way different than their parents.
I am conducting my fieldwork in Xiamen, PRC doing interviews with parents and students from local primary and middle schools. I am also tracing public discourse related to students’ surveillance from various social media platforms.
Rune Steenberg (Palacky University in Olomouc)
Paper short abstract:
Despite having the world's arguably most high-tech system including cutting-edge AI technology, state surveillance in Xinjiang still relies heavily on human informers and personal observation. This paper explores the interaction between human and technology in surveillance and how to research it.
Paper long abstract:
Andrew had been registered at a dozen checkpoints and he had been filmed for hours by surveillance cameras during his trip through a Xinjiang torn by mass incarceration, fear and ethnic tension in summer 2019. Yet, only two weeks into his research trip in Xinjiang, only when a taxi driver reported on him at the local police station, did the Chinese secret police "invite him for tea", as the local euphemism for light interrogation has it. The taxi driver had more than his possible political fervor or the anticipation of political or economic rewards to motivate this reporting. In the car they had been discussing the securitization and excessive surveillance in Xinjiang over the last years. The driver knew very well, that the conversation was being monitored by the help of cameras and microphones inside his taxi. As in the classical panopticon, he did not know whether anyone would be paying attention. He probably reported on the conversation just in case - to rather be safe than sorry, and the recordings would have most likely not been heard by anyone had he not. Starting from this anecdote, using leaked security files from Ürümchi, travel reports, intervews and online sources, this paper explores the interaction between human and technology in surveillance in Xinjaing and how to research it.