Activism and Digital Surveillance: Developing an Agenda for Scholarship

• In Event: Digital Formations and the Management of Visibilities

Abstract

Activism and digital surveillance: Developing an agenda for scholarship
Shiv Ganesh
School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing
Massey University
New Zealand

The last twenty years have seen a sharp rise in studies of surveillance. This is hardly surprising, given the profound acceleration of digital technologies, the transformation of systems of workplace control, the institutionalization of neoliberal regimes of governance, and the global war on terror. Even as surveillance practices expand and transform, accounts of resistance to it are manifold. Scholars have studied such resistant organizing practices to animate concepts as countersurveillance or sousveillance. The wide variety of resistant practice to contemporary digital surveillance has immense potential to build insight into the kinds of political and cultural mobilizations that characterise our current era, and consequently, what kinds of practices are occluded. Thus, this paper seeks to clarify current research trajectories on digital surveillance, and chart a course for organizational research on countersurveillant and sousveillant practice. I argue for the value of post-panoptic approaches to studying digital surveillance before highlighting some key themes in research on both countersurveillance and sousveillance, and conclude the paper with three productive directions for organizational research on sousveillance.

Author

• Shiv Ganesh, Massey University