Surveillance Media

Catalog description

Surveillance media surround us; we are watched by CCTV cameras and satellites and tracked by our cellphones and computers. In this course, we will examine surveillance media as technologies of power that do not neutrally perceive but actively produce subjects. This course focuses on government surveillance, looking at drones, border surveillance and war media, but extends to other sites such as the factory and workplace. Key threads here will be the origins of contemporary surveillance in capitalism, colonialism, and empire. Throughout the semester we will attend to how some are disproportionately targeted according to race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, religion, and citizenship. We will also ask what it means to resist surveillance, with particular attention to surveillance in contemporary visual culture. This entails asking what it means to look back and how not to be seen.