Volume 24, numéro 4, 2026 Open Issue

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Amazon warehouses are frequently and accurately described as highly controlled spaces, characterized by pervasive automated surveillance and strict labor discipline. While control is indeed continuous and deeply embedded in the labor process, they are not uniform, monolithic workplaces governed solely by management’s rules. Engaging with the use of Foucauldian concepts of panopticism and heterotopia in labor and organizational studies, this paper explores the labor process within Amazon warehouses through three key dimensions: visibility, or control by design; information asymmetries; and the internalization of discipline and control. Acknowledging the interplay between managerial strategies of control and workers re-actions, the paper redefines Amazon warehouses as contested spaces, where the company’s abstract ideal of a unique disciplined organization is integrated and eventually subverted by ephemeral, autonomous, and contradictory realities that workers (co)create through their practices.

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This paper examines pre-packaged policing: the outsourcing of complex policing functions to technology companies as parcelled socio-technical services, offered as a subscription to governments who do not need technical expertise. These varied commodities include software that bundles facial and voice biometric analysis, deep packet inspection, spyware, and more. In particular, it looks at how these commodities are not value neutral but instead accrue important discretion to service providers as well as dependencies on them. It does so by using frameworks from abolitionist, critical data, and critical surveillance scholarship to analyse three suites of commodities from Europe. Three arguments are made: First, that pre-packaged policing creates policing templates through the curation of seemingly self-evident packages of surveillance that are already pre-configured. The mass export of off-the-shelf policing allows discretionary power to be exercised by providers long before the technologies are deployed. Second, discretion and dependencies are accrued through the policing labour and architecture that is sold. This influence is obfuscated through the artificial binary between what is labelled as technical versus policing work—as well as the anything-as-a-service model that bundles subscriptions of software, hardware, and policing labour. Third, an uneven geography of export is created whereby different communities have varying abilities to influence providers based in Europe. These relationalities present a continuation of colonial projects that also exported policing regimes around the world. The adoption of simplified interfaces of policing with clickable surveillance options reifies carceral logics and excludes alternative possibilities of safety. This paper concludes with lessons from abolitionist scholarship and ways to counter the carceral horizons baked into pre-packaged policing commodities.

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Although the GDPR and other privacy-protecting measures in healthcare are deemed beneficial and necessary (albeit not sufficient) by surveillance and privacy scholars, it seems they have also gathered opposition among some of the ordinary people who nowadays interact with systems that comply with them. Individuals from this subgroup wish to roll back virtually all existing data protection measures within healthcare in order to avoid situations in which their data will not be accessible to someone they want to share them with. They also celebrate the amalgamation of all personal healthcare data into one centralized source, as they believe it will enable their desired seamless, universal access. This article is based on twenty semi-structured interviews with members of the Danish public who were asked to comment on a big-data healthcare surveillance-driven project being developed in Denmark. My main questions here are: How can one define anti-privacy? What do anti-privacy attitudes in healthcare look like, and what is one of the routes that may lead to their adoption? Results show that a non-trivial minority of the interviewees displayed anti-privacy attitudes, which appear to have originated from frustrating healthcare data experiences over the last few years. The article concludes by discussing the possible proliferation of such anti-privacy sentiments, their implications, and by making recommendations regarding future information privacy policy.

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Between 1834 and 1920, two million people migrated from India to other British colonies to work on plantations under indenture contracts (Kaladeen 2021). The Indian indenture program replaced slavery but bound workers to long-term, unfree labour in foreign lands. Britain developed complex institutions to mobilize and transport cheap labour power within and beyond its empire. Surveillance of indentured labourers was essential to the institutions, in which the “emigration pass” system played a key role in regulating the recruitment, registration, and migration of workers. Examining archival documents of emigration passes from India to Fiji, this article unpacks the hidden history of the Indian indenture program and analyzes the emigration pass as a tool for racializing surveillance embedded in the indenture system (Browne 2015). Emigration passes issued to migrant workers recorded a variety of personal information, including biometric data, such as fingerprints and bodily marks. While emigration passes declared clear consent by each worker to enter indenture, demarcating slavery, the passes also show that workers were subjected to intensive health surveillance, in which they were not only stripped naked in search of bodily marks but also assessed for signs of sexually transmitted infections and smallpox, and had their pulses, tongues, and general appearances checked (Mahase 2017). We argue that the emigration pass legitimized British officials’ access to indentured labourers’ bodies, transformed their previously indistinguishable bodies into identifiable information, and hid unfree realities of supposedly free labour.

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This study investigates the emergence of a possible new iteration of the immigration surveillance state. In this new iteration, extractivist corporations of the digital age mine large amounts of data from non-citizens not only to use the information against them—to track and monitor them—but also to further exploit these data with little to no regulation. These corporations aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—the federal agency in charge of enforcing immigration policy in the interior, administering the US immigration detention apparatus and carrying out deportations—to circumvent guidelines and ordinances, and avoid accountability and transparency. This creates a new dynamic, as these contractors enable the agency to skirt its legal obligations while they extract the data of immigrants and are able to repackage it and potentially further profit off it. In this dynamic, tech contractors, carrying out essential enforcement tasks, jointly operate the immigration surveillance state, further rendering it an extractivist, unaccountable, and for-profit machinery. Moreover, there are signs that these technologies—i.e., data tracking and electronic monitoring—are causing fear, mental distress, and trauma in the immigrant communities, which can potentially alter behaviors. I use two ICE contractors as entry points to understand this new iteration of the immigration surveillance state. One is the data broker LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which extracts, repackages, and sells personal data from practically all individuals residing in the United States. Another is BI Inc., the sole provider of electronic monitoring devices to ICE, which can track an individual uninterruptedly via GPS. Building on research and concepts such as the immigration surveillance state, the immigration industrial complex, data borders, and surveillance capitalism, this study analyzes what I argue constitutes a new dynamic between ICE and its tech contractors—a novel iteration of the immigration surveillance state.

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As with numerous other AI-assisted educational tools, neurotechnology is now also entering classrooms. While techno-optimists herald the importance of using modern technologies for the purposes of personalising education, less is known about the public’s reaction to witnessing these technologies in action. To critically investigate audience responses to the use of neurotechnology in the classroom, we collected n= 3,754 comments posted to a YouTube video story about the experimental use of AI-assisted attention-monitoring headbands in Jinhua Xiaoshun Primary school. By applying a critical discursive psychology approach, our analysis shows a clash between techno-optimistic views and people who view such technologies as symbols of oppressing students, particularly their creativity. Discussions of the technology could be categorised under three interpretive repertoires: (1) “Like a Fitbit for your brain,” (2) “Making cookie-cutter kids,” and (3) “It’s all about control.” We discuss the implications of introducing doom-monitoring technologies—indiscriminate and inaccurate surveillance conducted in anticipation of the “next bad thing”—into children’s learning paths. Wider socio-cultural discourses of resisting oppression and excessive surveillance are at the root of critical assessments of doom-monitoring technologies, while techno-enthusiasm towards the potential for precise measurement of children’s attention spans underlies support for the continued use of similar technologies. Moreover, Western audiences view Chinese use of such technologies as oppressing, while often failing to notice the hypocrisy that lies therein: when authoritarian regimes use surveillance technologies, it relates to control and oppression, while similar instances in Western contexts are mere bumps on the road to important innovation.

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The availability of access to sophisticated surveillance infrastructures has made childhood surveillance an accepted part of parenting and a growing area of study. However, less interest has been shown in the question of the limits of such surveillance, in particular when it involves the surveillance of young adults. This paper aims to address the question of the ethical implications of the surveillance of young adults, the arguments for extended surveillance beyond childhood, and the evolution of surveillance norms surrounding the relationship between parents and their young adult children.

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This paper argues that teachers’ power to conduct surveillance is co-constructed or enabled by the sociomaterial coordination of both human and nonhuman actors in specific teaching contexts. The interaction and coordination between teachers, students, teaching materials, and affects such as students’ anxiety facilitate what this paper calls a sensibility of surveillance: the affective and embodied experiences through which individuals perceive and respond to surveillance in the classroom. Surveillance, therefore, is an affective and embodied experience. To support this argument, I analyse observation and interview data of teaching practices from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Chinese university to demonstrate how surveillance practices broke down and were repaired through negotiations between human and nonhuman elements in the classroom. I conclude the paper by advocating for a more nuanced understanding of surveillance in education that pays attention to sociomaterial dynamics and the ways in which human and non-human actors interact to create particular sensibilities of surveillance that can support or detract from educational goals.