The research group is comprised of the following members:
Dr Gavin Smith, Dept. of Sociology and Social Policy; Coordinator, The Surveillance and Everyday Life Research Group
Dr Gavin J. D. Smith is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Sydney, Australia and an Honorary Visiting Fellow at The Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism, City University London, UK. Gavin’s research explores the cultural circuitries in which surveillance systems are embedded and the emergent post-humanism cultivated by surveillance-subject interplays. He is particularly interested in better understanding the meanings people attach to their encounters with surveillance as both organisational practice and cultural form.
He is presently working on projects examining:
a) the relationship between political economy and surveillance normalization (how popular culture both represents surveillance and transforms it into a commodity);
b) the application of surveillance apparatuses into diverse cultural fields (at local and global levels);
c) the role of the scientific imagination in the creation, design, manufacture and legitimation of surveillance devices; and
d) the normative assumptions, language and forms of knowledge which structure the surveillance and social control research field.
Gavin has published several journal articles and numerous book chapters on surveillance and is currently writing a monograph exploring the lived experiences of surveillance workers – Opening the Black Box: The Everyday Life of Surveillance (Routledge, 2012 – http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415587297/) – and a co-authored text on the central concepts, issues and debates dominating the surveillance studies field – Key Concepts in Surveillance Cultures (with Martin French, Sage, 2013). He is a co-editor on the journal Surveillance and Society and a non-executive director of the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN): the international research and information network on surveillance (http://www.surveillance-studies.net/), a registered charitable company dedicated to the study of surveillance in all its forms, and the free distribution of scholarly information. He has recently co-edited a special issue on ‘Theorizing Surveillance in Crime Control’ in Theoretical Criminology, 15(3), a world leading Criminology journal. Gavin leads The Surveillance and Everyday Life Research Group.
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Dr Peter Marks, English
I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. I am researching the cultural representation and examination of surveillance in literature and films. Utopias and dystopias from Plato’s Republic through Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and China Mieville’s The City and the City have explored the political, cultural and moral implications of monitored societies. Films such as The Truman Show, Minority Report, Code 46 and Gattaca have depicted ‘ideal’ worlds in which surveillance has been integrated with entertainment, crime and genetics. These and texts like them present us with provocative projections of the near future, challenging us to take account of established and emerging trends and processes. As David Lyon claims: ‘Such movies and novels help us get our bearings on what surveillance is all about . . . . and give us a sense of the kind of world we wish to avoid.’ I have published several articles on this area (see, for example, ‘Imagining Surveillance: Utopian Visions and Surveillance Studies’), and is beginning work on a book-length study of the topic.
In addition, I am interested in literature as social critique; in relationships between literature and cinema, as well as between literature and politics; in periodical culture, and in utopias (broadly conceived). My new book, George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture, (http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=158813&SntUrl=153145) is the first sustained account of Orwell’s essays. I also produced the first sustained critical study of the director Terry Gilliam for Manchester University Press’s British Filmmakers series (2009).
As well as being in the ‘Surveillance in Everyday Life’ research group I am a member of the ‘Environmental Humanities’ research group. I am a Fellow of the English Association (UK) and was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge (2009-10).
Publications 2005-2011
Books
- 2011, George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture (Continuum)
- 2009, Terry Gilliam (Manchester University Press)
Book chapters
- 2011, The Left in the Twenties, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 2 North America, 1880–1960 (Oxford University Press)
- 2011, The Left in the Thirties, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 2 North America, 1880–1960 (Oxford University Press)
- 2009, Art and Politics in the 1930s: The European Quarterly, Left Review and Poetry and the People, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 1 Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford University Press)
Journal articles
- 2008, Adaptation from Charles Darwin to Charlie Kaufman, Sydney Studies in English, 34, 19-40
- 2008 Chesher, C, Marks, P R, Cleland, K J (eds.) 2008, Screenscapes, Scan (Sydney): journal of media arts culture
- 2008, Surveillance screens and screening in ‘Code 46′, Scan (Sydney): journal of media arts culture, 5(1), 1-15
- 2005, ‘And God Saw Everything’: Paradise, Utopia and Surveillance, Script & Print: bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 29(1-4), 178-191
- 2005, Imagining surveillance: utopian visions and surveillance studies, Surveillance and Society, 3(2-3), 222-239
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Associate Professor Stephen Robertson, History
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Professor Pat O’Malley, Sydney Law School
Pat O’Malley is professorial research fellow in law at the University of Sydney. Current interests focusing on surveillance include:
- the use of protocols and radio frequency detection devices in the regulation of traffic offences and traffic circulations, and the nexus of these with sanctioning techniques such as fines and demerit points;
- the emergence and formation of fire knowledge networks – linking relevant professions, government agencies, private industries etc - and their impact on the formation of risk-based fire protection and related monitoring assemblages;
- changes in the ways risk is rendered visible, focusing on insurance modelling of fire, disaster and terrorist related risks to life and property;
- the ways in which visual imaginaries implicit in the idea of ‘surveillance’ are being challenged and surpassed by other ‘touchless’ technologies
Dr Greg Martin, Socio‐Legal Studies
Dr Greg Martin is a Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Greg completed his degree and doctorate (both in Sociology) at the University of Exeter. Subsequently, he did a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, taught in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Keele University, was a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, travelled the world, completed a law degree at the University of Western Australia, worked in legal publishing, and taught criminology at the University of Western Sydney. Greg’s interests in surveillance revolve around policing and public order policing and developments in criminal and constitutional law in the context of the “war on terror”. Greg has a number of co-authored and co-edited publications and has published several articles in international journals, including the British Journal of Sociology, Crime Media Culture, Policing and Society, Social Movement Studies, Sociology, The Sociological Review, and Sociology. Among other things, Greg is presently writing a textbook on social movements for Routledge.
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Dr Kane Race, Gender and Cultural Studies
Dr Kathy Cleland, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Digital Cultures Program, SLAM
Dr Kathy Cleland’s research focuses on the ways new media technologies are used as modes of surveillance, self-surveillance and self-presentation in the domains of the visual and performing arts, and in popular online culture. Her PhD thesis “Image Avatars: self-other encounters in a mediated world” (2008) investigated the role of imaging technologies is the construction of subjectivity and identity and explored modes of surveillance and self-surveillance from mirror images to digital avatars. Two major visual art exhibitions she curated in 2008, Mirror States, and Face to Face: portraiture in a digital age also incorporated the work of artists using video cameras to capture images of audience members. Kathy is currently researching the histories and aesthetics of surveillance and self-presentation in the visual arts from early video art installations to today’s proliferation of websites that display live webcam images and databases of personal images and information.
Note: publications can be downloaded from http://www.kathycleland.com
Selected Publications
Cleland, Kathy (2011 upcoming) The History and Aesthetics of Surveillance Art. Rewire Conference, Liverpool 27-30 Sept, 2011.
Cleland, Kathy (2009) Face-to-face: Avatars and Mobile Identities. In Goggin, G. and Hjorth, L. (Eds.) Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media, New York: Routledge, pp.219-234.
Cleland, Kathy (2008) The New Face of Portraiture in a Digital Age. Face to Face: portraiture in a digital age. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: d/Lux/MediaArts
Cleland, Kathy (Sept, 2007) Entering the Screen. Artlink. 27:3, pp.22-27.
Cleland, Kathy (2009) Intimate Encounters: the Mixed Reality Paradigm and Audience Responses. Digital Arts and Culture Conference. UC Irvine, 14-16 December, 2009.
Cleland, Kathy (2006) Image Avatars and Media Mirrors. Engage: audience, art and interaction Conference. University of Technology, Sydney, 26-28 Nov 2006.
(Note: publications can be downloaded from http://www.kathycleland.com)
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Dr Rebecca Scott Bray, Socio‐Legal Studies
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Dr Charlotte Epstein, Government and International Relations
Charlotte Epstein is a Kenyan-born French International Relations (IR) scholar centrally interested in the role of discurive power in shaping international politics. Key related publications include The Power of Words in International Relations (MIT Press, runner up to the 2009 ISA Sprout Award), ‘Who Speaks? Discourse, the Subject and the Study of Identity in International Politics European Journal of International Relations ( 2011).
She brings these concerns to bear on the ways in which surveillance technologies are reshaping everyday practices of the international, such as the crossing of borders. She has explored such questions in her ‘Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders’, International Political Sociology (2007) and ‘Embodying Risk: Using Biometrics to Protect the Borders’ in Risk and the War on Terror, ed. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (2008). Charlotte read International Relations at the University of Cambridge (PhD and Mphil) after reading Philosophy (Mphil and BA) and Literature (BA) at the Universités de Paris I-Sorbonne I and Paris III-Censier.
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Mr Garner Clancey, Sydney Institute of Criminology
Garner is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Sydney Institute of Criminology (Sydney Law School, University of Sydney). Garner has studied psychology, criminology, urban planning and recently commenced a PhD focusing on local forms of crime prevention. Garner initially worked in the New South Wales (NSW) public service for 10 years (NSW Department of Juvenile Justice and the NSW Police Force) and has worked on crime prevention consultancies for the last nine years. During this time, Garner has devised a resource manual for public space closed-circuit television (CCTV) for the Australian Institute of Criminology; developed crime prevention plans for local councils; delivered training to security guards, police and others in various Australian jurisdictions and undertaken crime risk assessments of proposed developments. Garner has taught policing, security, criminology and crime prevention courses for in excess of 10 years at various universities, including the University of Sydney and the University of NSW. Garner is currently an Executive Member of the Australian Crime Prevention Council and a member of the NSW Young Offender’s Advisory Committee.
Links between surveillance and crime prevention are of particular interest to Garner. His recent research interest has focused on crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) and the work of local government Community Safety Officers.
