Who's watching? Surveillance and Society

“Surveillance cultures” and “surveillance societies” have become important notions to characterize nowadays societies and prominent terms when people criticize various practices of monitoring people and their behavior e.g., on social media platforms, in sports stadiums, at schools and workplaces, or at airport security checks, which often includes the collection of personal data.

In this course, we will map and unpack notions and concepts of surveillance. In fact, the social meaning of surveillance and control has become increasingly complex. Ordinary citizens were traditionally framed as the object of panoptic top-down state surveillance. Now they are also active agents within the many lateral forms of peer surveillance or mutual watching in more decentralized, participatory, and social surveillance practices. Moreover, we see a convergence of state, commercial, and consumer surveillance.

We will discuss classics within Surveillance Studies such as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and we will examine their relevance for understanding surveillance today. Moreover, we will shed light on contemporary concepts such as “social surveillance” or “surveillance capitalism” and shifts toward the continuous tracking and collection of (meta)data for unstated preset purposes that are described as e.g. “dataveillance” or “big data surveillance”.

By the end of the course, students will

1. be aware of key theories of surveillance,
2. have the skills to critically engage in contemporary debates about the interrelation of institutions and practices of surveillance, social media platforms, and everyday practices of (surveillance) technology usage. And
3. be able to critically engage in contemporary debates about the implications of surveillance practices for social life, security, and protection, privacy and control, consumption, empowerment, and resistance.

In presence

Lectures will be based on input presentations by the course director. However, the teaching style is based on a dialogic and interactive setting. Therefore, students are asked to read the mandatory texts and to actively participate in discussions in class. Inputs by the course director will be complemented by students’ group activities. The lectures will be held in English. Attendance in the lectures is strongly recommended to follow the discussion in class. The complete reading list, as well as references for further readings, will be provided prior to the beginning of the course. Mandatory readings will be made available on iCorsi.

Evaluation will be based on the students’ group activities during the semester (short presentation, poster, and poster presentation, 30%) and on a written final exam (70%). The written exam will consist of 4-5 open-ended questions. To successfully pass the course it is mandatory to pass both, the group tasks and the final written exam.