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Paper short abstract:

While navigating public spaces of Delhi, one unavoidably encounters Delhi Police’s barricades that populate most public spaces in India’s capital. In this paper, I follow the object of the police barricade for over a year, to produce an ethnographic account of policing and surveillance in the city.

Paper long abstract:

The Delhi Police’s barricades are movable metal structures, which collectively are one of the most visible fixtures in the city’s urban landscape. These barricades, painted in bright yellow to increase their visibility at night, along with red labelling that establishes their authority and legitimacy, throng the crowded capital and prominently occupy most of its public spaces.

Often these barricades can be found in long, endless queues, along the city’s roads. In Central Delhi, the political and administrative centre of India, these barricades placed in layers fortify the “VIP area”, guarding the gates of prominent government offices, the parliament, and official residences of India’s President, Prime Minister and many other political figures. Some of these barricades huddle around the city’s borders, observing, monitoring and guiding the traffic trickling into the city. In Delhi’s posh markets, several of these barricades join hands to create enclosures which withhold vehicles and roadside vendors alike. At protest sites like the Jantar Mantar, these metal structures come together to form an opaque and impenetrable wall, that creates a boundary separating the criminalised protester from the law-abiding resident. The barricades openly discriminate between the different people who cross their paths. They move for some, but stop others from moving.

In this paper, I follow the object of police barricades across Delhi for over a year. By centring my attention on the barricades, I reflect on policing and surveillance in the capital city (and indeed the whole country), and contemplate their impact on the freedoms of Indian citizens.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on surveillance-conscious encounters between watchers and watched in urban policing. It explores how CCTV cameras influence the behavior of those who know that human eyes are behind the machine’s surveillance gaze in order to understand the symbolic meaning ascribed to cameras.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when surveillance-conscious eyes meet the animated gaze of video surveillance cameras? How do these encounters influence the behavior of police staff and youths from disadvantaged neighborhoods who know that there are people behind the cameras watching them in real-time?

This paper draws on ethnographic observations in CCTV control rooms in French municipalities to explore how cameras are appropriated and contested through ordinary encounters between CCTV operators behind the screens and those watched in front of the cameras. In these technologically mediated interactions, far from being objective eyewitnesses (Jeursen 2022), the cameras as third parties evoke behavioral change. In consequence, some CCTV operators avoid cameras to escape the gaze of their colleagues, and youth from disadvantaged neighborhoods check with a hasty glance towards the camera whether or not they are being followed. These mundane surveillance-conscious encounters inform us about the entanglements between watchers and watched (Brayne 2021) and the shared meaning ascribed to an object such as the surveillance camera. More extraordinary encounters, such as the destruction of CCTV cameras, exemplify how these objects are appropriated through contestation – and thus inform us about a less well-known side of their social and political life (Appadurai 1986, Fassin 2017).

By drawing on the classic example of video surveillance in urban policing, this paper investigates the possibility that some panoptic properties of video surveillance cameras may influence mostly those who are conscious that when they look into the camera lens, someone might look back.

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Paper short abstract:

This project is an ethnographic examination of lateral surveillance in the contemporary U.S. focusing on two technologies for watching others: home security cameras and social media apps for connecting with neighbors. I am interested in how these technologies shape sociality and fear.

Paper long abstract:

In this project, I seek to understand lateral surveillance in the contemporary United States by an ethnographic examination of two intersecting technologies for watching others – home security cameras, commonly seen on people’s doors or gates, and social media apps for connecting with neighbors and sharing observations and concerns about public behavior in the area. Both technologies have become ubiquitous in urban neighborhoods across the country. I am collecting data through an online survey of home security camera users and interviews and observations at the homes of people who use them. In addition, I am monitoring communication on neighborhood-based applications for sharing information. In this paper, I examine the motivations and uses of home security cameras with a special interest in how this technology shapes sociality and the ways it articulates fear. I also am interested in how the technology relates to social power given that different types of users have very different motivations and fears. Finally, although I do not use personal security devices, I reflect on the complexities of watching the watchers and collecting data about how they collect data about each other.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores surveillance practices carried out by public “welfare fraud controllers” in Denmark. Taking inspiration from the anthropology of credit and debt, the paper discusses money as a moral third supposed to regulate encounters between recipients and donors of social security.

Paper long abstract:

Ongoing political pressures have assigned greater priority to uncovering and cracking down on welfare fraud in Denmark. As the Danish welfare state has undergone sweeping digitalization, welfare fraud control work has been split into two: decentral municipalities, insisting on investigative practices requiring physical co-presence with citizens and on the criticalness of “locally” sensitive knowledge, and a central agency (“Payout Denmark”), monitoring and policing benefit ineligibility via semi-automated digital data collection done remotely. My ethnographic material is saturated by mutual expressions of self-legitimation and other-directed denunciation (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) based on the respective party’s preferred methods of surveillance. Payout Denmark has latched onto media controversy regarding systematic, intrusive observations – popularly, “duvet lifting” – carried out by some municipalities, claiming that their own, politically sanctioned, mode of fraud detection succeeds in unmasking the secret intentions of welfare recipients in a respectable, optimal, and purely objective manner. Such framings obscure the moral foundations of Payout Denmark – and the fact that the surveillance operations of the two institutions are underpinned and animated by identical emic conceptions of money. The parties share a conception of widespread ‘financial evasiveness’ (Peebles, 2012) where citizens are perpetually at work of developing and disseminating new “recipes of fraud,” ultimately dooming a moral economy where the exchange of money is constrained by ‘deservingness’ (Tošić & Streinzer, 2022). Taking inspiration from the anthropology of credit and debt, I propose to conceive money as a moral third, supposed to mediate the engagements between the state and its citizens.

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Paper short abstract:

Surveillance Dynamics in a Post-Disciplinary Prison in Belgium : Unpacking the Interplay of Human and Technological Controls Through Professional Practices of Surveillance.

Paper long abstract:

This study examines the complex interplay of human and technological control mechanisms in a newly established maximum-security prison in Belgium. Through an analysis of surveillance practices, it sheds light on the negotiation of diverse professional roles. The facility, known as the Penitentiary Village, is presented as a "model" of humanized detention, achieved through peri-urban-inspired architecture, technological devices, and a reform of penitentiary personnel. This reform entails a redefinition of the penitentiary agent's role towards a social reintegration mission and a functional redistribution of surveillance tasks.

These changes are linked to contrasting security concepts: frontline personnel, referred to as "accompaniers," are assigned tasks of "active surveillance" aimed at dynamic security based on positive staff-inmate relationships. Meanwhile, the Control and Information Post (CIP) remotely manages control of people's movements through technological devices (cameras, remote door opening) – termed "passive surveillance." Contrary to its label, the CIP plays an active role as a third-party agent, challenging the traditional staff-inmate dichotomy of "surveillor-surveilland."

In the context of an ideological shift in professional missions (post-disciplinary prison) and the significant recruitment of untrained accompaniers, the CIP's surveillance underscores resistance and control over accompaniers' practices, viewed as too lenient or social. Accompaniers claim their rehabilitation efforts are hindered as they are consistently directed remotely by the CIP, compelling them to adjust their practices. The model, ostensibly promoting inmate autonomy through technology and interpersonal relationships, paradoxically intensifies surveillance by implementing a more diffuse, comprehensive, and discretionary control authority.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on concepts of thirdness as a point of exit from the moral ambiguity that surrounds information collection. In the context of German privacy advocacy, bureaucratic institutions configured by the German constitutional state offer moral mediators for personal information.

Paper long abstract:

Surveillance scholars have long observed that surveillance may take both legitimate and illegitimate forms. This paper draws on concepts of thirdness to offer a point of exit from this ambiguity. The variable moral legitimacy of the third may offer insight into the variable legitimacy of the surveillance in question.

Drawing on ongoing ethnography with privacy and data protection advocates in Germany, the paper explores emic notions of bureaucracy as a legitimate mediator of personal information. Placing archival research in local district courts into juxtaposition with discourses of opposition to surveillance, the paper suggests that the relative legitimacy of information collection in this context rests upon how information collection is institutionally mediated. Associational life (Vereine), configured and enabled by the German constitution provides, here, the societal basis for the 'activities' (Solove 2008), that a discourse of privacy is called on to protect.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how tracking technologies are increasingly used within families in Munich as a ‘third gaze’ beyond face-to-face watching, and how these technologies are welcomed by some as a form of care, and resisted by others due to perceived risks associated with third party tracking.

Paper long abstract:

In 2017, smart dolls such as ‘My Friend Cayla’ or technologies with undercover listening functions were classified as illegal espionage software in Germany. Recently, tracking technologies that allow parents and children to watch each other legally are on the rise, e.g. parents tracking their children’s geolocations, or children checking their family member’s locations at a distance.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Munich, this paper focuses on the role of technologies 'as a third' in child-parent relationships. Some install family tracking apps such as Life360 or buy smartwatches for their children, hence enabling location tracking to occur at a distance and in the background, often without users directly interacting with the apps or devices. Likewise, screen time monitoring that is possible within some of these same apps often happens without the direct intervention of the parent, except when they install this initially.

While technologies are sometimes welcomed as a ‘third gaze’ that can support families in providing care and managing family life, others are more hesitant towards digital tracking technologies arguing that there are risks associated with the use of these, since third parties can potentially join this kind of watching posing a risk to families.

Drawing on anthropological theories of exchange and ‘the absented third person’ (Rio 2007), this paper discusses how human strangers can both be seen as a threat or an ‘other’ that needs to be guarded against by using a non-human gaze, but unknown community members as potentially benevolent helpers are sometimes trusted more than tracking technologies.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the impact of a centralised form of electronic fetal monitoring in labour globally, despite lack of evidence of benefit and concern about potential harm. I will discuss the drivers and layers of surveillance shaping the emergence of this technology and practice.

Paper long abstract:

Who is watching the watcher?

Centralised electronic foetal monitoring (CEFM) involves use of a an electronic monitor (CardioTocoGraph) in labour care to trace the frequency, length and duration of uterine contractions and the heartbeat of the fetus. Use of CTGs has been spread globally, despite evidence that they do not lead to improvement in neonatal outcomes and are associated with some harms for maternal health. CEFM is a further step in this form of surveillance – a central screen is placed outwith the labour room at a central station where it can be viewed by other professionals not attending the birth. There is no clinical evidence to support its use and some evidence that it may have unintended harms, yet a recent inquiry report into safety in maternity services mandated its use in the UK.

CEFM was introduced, arguably, in response to the failure of CTGs to improve safety. It thus proposed a further technical solution to a technological surveillance problem, while introducing new layers of third party surveillance: first, the professionals who observe the central screen without any role in attending a particular labour, any relationship with the labouring woman/person or knowledge of other observational signs of labour progress or wellbeing; second, external bodies such as the Care Quality Commission which have powers to sanction professionals for errors, and service insurers, concerned to avoid or reduce litigation claims; third, the mainstream and social media discourse which may frame the response to poor outcomes in terms of deficiencies in surveillance.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the ethnographic context of psy-technologies in Britain to examine the role and significance of third parties. It suggests a way of situating ‘the third’ in both analytical and ethnographic terms.

Paper long abstract:

The role and significance of third parties have long been debated in the field of psychotherapy, from third-party payers and scientific observers to the development of ‘the analytic third’ between the analyst and analysand. More recently, effected by the use of digital psy-technologies in the form of smartphone apps, online courses, and wearable monitoring devices, the question of third parties has resurfaced in new and important ways: are technologies mediators, intervenors or collectors? who is monitoring whom and why? how is health data used and what exactly is shared?

Drawing on anthropological research on health surveillance and self-monitoring in Britain, I reflect on both older and recent concerns about the role of ‘third parties’. Whilst a third party might claim to ameliorate, change, or even subvert the relationship between observer and observed, therapist and patient, surveillor and surveilland, it can also be seen to cement the very dyad it seeks to reconfigure. Moving historically and ethnographically from psychotherapy to digital therapy opens up an analytical vantage point from which we might detect some of the merits and problems of ‘the third’.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how the exchnage of cryptocurrencies implicates practices of surveillaqnce online, elaborating on two ethnographic case studies wherein a "third party" had to intervene in order to protect the interests of users.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2008 a person or group of people using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published in a cryptography mailing list an academic paper titled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' (Nakamoto 2008). The "blockchain", as this system is now called, regules the production and exchange of electronic money directly between partners in ways that successfully make the auditing role of "trusted third parties" (ibid: 1) obsolete. The blockchain thus effectively decentralizes these auditing responsibilities between all the "peers" that use it at any given tiume. A single, flat, digital territory on which all members of the network of peers 'see' each other all the time consequently overrides the power of any single sovereign entity to issue money while relocating this power 'back' into the simultaneous hands of a multiplicity of users. In this paper I will contemplate how the decentralization of cash implicates practices of surveillaqnce online, focusing on two ethnographic case studies wherein a "third party" had to intervene in order to protect the interests of users.