Volume 23, numéro 2, 2025 Open Issue

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Surveillance studies has long drawn on Michel Foucault’s (1977) panopticon and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) assemblage to analyse how surveillance functions and its many societal effects. More recently, there has been a particular emphasis on how profiles, otherwise known as data doubles, have played an increased role in surveillance using artificial intelligence. While this scholarship has explored how data are gathered and analysed, this article problematises the ability for the data flowing from humans to machines to be so revelatory of subjectivity. In doing so, this article considers how adopting a psychoanalytical notion of desire, drawn from Jacques Lacan (2007), problematises the assumption that data stemming from outward affirmations of subjectivity are an accurate reflection of who we are. If desire is bound to lack, instead of being an active, positive force, this raises a host of questions about how surveillance is confronted by cuts, blockages, absences, and exclusions when trying to make sense of an individual. As this article argues, this gap of knowledge between profiles and individuals is not because there is a flaw within surveillance but because surveillance itself depends on a constitutive void: the necessary gap of knowledge between data and desire, in light of machines only ever being able to interpret humans as machines. The void of surveillance is not what merely sustains surveillance, as needing to know more to fill a gap of knowledge, but sustains the necessary failure of total surveillance’s goal of knowing everything there is to know about an individual, given there is always more to know. This article shows how paying attention to this void offers new insights into surveillance’s misunderstanding of subjectivity.

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Monitoring technologies are increasingly used in schools to track students’ digital activity—including web browsing, app use, and more—and can even follow them beyond the physical schoolhouse gates. Informed by interviews with twenty-two US-based teachers, we propose a theory of “algorithmic theater” that captures the negotiated role these technologies play as instruments of schooling and state control. This theory situates the relationship among labor, performativity, infrastructure, and audience in the production of an algorithmic script, much as a theater company employs those elements in producing a play. We use algorithmic theater to frame the teachers’ statements about these technologies and to disentangle the coordinated and contested narratives about algorithmic omniscience, efficiency, and care from the material realities of the classroom. For example, while tracking technologies are often marketed as omniscient, students can successfully resist and evade the tools. These technologies elicit strong beliefs among teachers: some feel assured by a cheating-proof, distraction-free learning environment; others are concerned about the extreme nature of the monitoring. But all of the teachers who used the tools experienced a reconfiguring of the school environment to make space for algorithms that changed the nature of deviance, productivity, and accountability. Drawing on literature of surveillance and performativity, we argue that school tracking regimes employing monitoring tools harbor constrictive views of teachers and students’ capacities, as the biases encoded within these tools promote the othering and disciplining of non-normative behaviors related to movement, self-expression, exploration, learning, and creativity. Ultimately, we contend that tracking technologies exceed a necessary level of surveillance in schools while covertly promoting racist and ableist socio-technical arrangements.

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Why do people voluntarily give away their personal data to private companies? In this paper, we show how data sharing is experienced at the level of Tesla car owners. We regard Tesla cars as luxury surveillance goods for which the drivers voluntarily choose to share their personal data with the US company. Based on an analysis of semi-structured interviews and observations of Tesla owners’ posts on Facebook groups, we discern three elements of luxury surveillance: socializing, enjoying, and enduring. We conclude that luxury surveillance can be traced back to the social bonds created by a gift economy.

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In the field of surveillance studies, scholars have focused on the use of art to offer an aesthetic intervention into the operation of surveillance systems. Scholars have used the term “surveillance art” to capture a genre of artwork that draws critical attention to the use of surveillance technologies. Through Sadie Barnette’s work The FBI Project (2016–ongoing), this article argues that Barnette’s work offers a critical intervention into the field of surveillance art by foregrounding the racial logic of surveillance. By taking up the literature on surveillance art and drawing on Torin Monahan’s (2022) notion of critical surveillance art, the article presents Barnette’s artwork as a model for contending with the racial tenor of surveillance regimes. As a way of exposing and redressing the racial violence of surveillance, Barnette’s instantiation of surveillance art offers new ways of imagining and perceiving the world and, as such, poses the possibility of intervening in the operation of our contemporary surveillance system. Ultimately, the article provides a reading of Barnette’s FBI series as offering co-constructive interventions into both the genre of surveillance art and the structure of racial surveillance. Barnette’s artwork acts as a form of critical surveillance art, which offers an aesthetic experience that moves beyond the critique of surveillance mechanisms and offers a view of the sites of resistance that exceed the bounds of surveillance.

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Although workplace surveillance is often conceptualized as a simplified dichotomy of control vs. care or resistance vs. compliance, it can be understood as something that employees enact and in which they take an active part. However, surveillance creates a paradox for those who wish to enact professionalism in their work roles. Whereas being transparent and welcoming scrutiny is considered professional, the visibility that comes with surveillance diminishes the discretionary power and autonomy that are at the core of being professional. In addition, new surveillance technologies implemented into work life may introduce new audiences and thereby new scripts for how to enact professionalism. In this article, we examine how employees use professional talk to handle the paradoxes of workplace surveillance. We ask how employees use surveillance to signal their professionalism and how they balance competing scripts on how to perform professionally to different audiences. Our analysis is based on interviews with two distinct occupational groups affected by the introduction of new types of surveillance technologies into their daily work: private security officers, who may wear body-worn cameras, and doctors, whose medical records are now accessible to their patients online. By examining the ways in which these two distinct occupational groups use professional talk to handle the paradoxes of workplace surveillance, we contribute to the growing research on professional talk as a discursive resource. Furthermore, we augment the literature that adopts a dramaturgical approach to workplace surveillance by extending the understanding of professionalism as something that is done by a profession, instead viewing professionalism as something that can be discursively produced by any occupational group. Finally, our study provides an important contribution to surveillance studies as we continue the exploration of the paradoxes of workplace surveillance, moving beyond the understanding of employees’ reaction to workplace surveillance as either compliance or resistance.

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For this study, I led thirty-two study participants on a 1.5-mile community “data walk” in Long Beach, California, to gain insights into the trust and comfort levels residents experience when encountering smart technologies that track their movements and capture their image. During the walk, study participants used a custom mobile app to map and photograph each smart technology observed. Participants then responded to prompts intended to gauge their perceptions of various smart technologies including surveillance cameras, public Wi-Fi routers, and license plate readers. The analysis—which relied on theoretical frameworks grounded in cultures of trust, surveillance studies, and contextual integrity—found that study participants are generally unaware of the ubiquitous nature of surveillance technologies deployed by both public and private entities, and they can only speculate on how personal information collected is stored, shared, and analyzed. Volunteers also expressed concern about the discriminatory impacts of smart technologies, particularly those used by law enforcement. The findings advocate for structural change, shifting the burden of personal data protection off users themselves.