Digital platforms and social media shape social, economic, and political life, making participation almost unavoidable (Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal 2018; Steinberg 2019). This platformization, driven by datafication, records and commodifies user activity for corporate profit (West 2019). While users perceive their engagement as private, they present a public persona that is subject to commercial and political surveillance (Baym and boyd 2012; Zuboff 2015). LGBTQ+ users face a paradox: social media is crucial for identity formation, community building, and self-expression (Robards et al. 2019), yet they encounter intensified algorithmic surveillance through content moderation tactics such as shadowbanning, demonetization, and account suspension (Are 2022; Bivens and Haimson 2016; Gillespie 2022). This study examines how LGBTQ+ users in Montr & eacute;al and Berlin navigate platform regulations and resist algorithmic oppression via qualitative interviews with cultural producers, activists, and performers. Findings reveal two central themes: being seen and looking back. LGBTQ+ users are keenly aware of surveillance, exemplified by Astra, a Berlin-based activist, whose account was deleted after managing a queer collective's social media. Confronted with inevitable monitoring, users adopt strategies like creating backup accounts, using alternative promotional methods, and deliberately defying censorship. This resistance is taxing; Sasha Kills, a Berlin-based drag artist, notes: "We don't have a choice, and it is really unfair." The research deepens data-justice discussions by showing that resistance is not merely emergent but a mandatory practice for LGBTQ+ users in digital spaces. Ignoring surveillance jeopardizes their ability to benefit from platform affordances. In an era of platformization and the growing co-optation of social structures, being excluded from platforms is a risk they cannot afford.
The use of domestic surveillance products such as Amazon’s Ring doorbell system has, in recent years, become widespread. While the fisheye lenses and glowing blue LED buttons of Ring doorbells have become familiar sights on doorsteps in North America and beyond, little information is presented to end users regarding Ring’s relationships with police agencies and data brokers, and, perhaps most significantly, its deployment of emerging facial recognition technologies. This paper examines the emergence of the Ring doorbell and similar home security products, attempting to unravel the possibilities and dangers of the increasing implementation of facial recognition technologies in domestic and public space. We deploy a research-creation method to bring these possibilities and risks to the fore. Our interactive exhibition Enter the Ring seeks to invert the information asymmetry held by the proprietors of proprietary domestic surveillance platforms: where Amazon and other businesses conceal the myriad ways that their video surveillance products quantify individuals and draw inferences from human faces, our installation instead serves as a mirror that reveals to the audience the extent to which these techniques can be deployed to make predictions as to an individual’s identity and, ultimately, whether they might be deemed risky or safe. We argue that this kind of artistic intervention using interactive media serves a crucial role in bridging the information gap around facial recognition technologies and may be used to benefit both public education and regulatory action regarding algorithmic surveillance.
This article serves as the editor’s introduction to the Surveillance & Society special issue on “Surveillance and Literature.” It offers a synopsis of important developments in the relationship between literary studies and surveillance studies, with an emphasis on the years since surveillance studies’ late-2000s “cultural turn” (Monahan 2011). These developments include the broadening of the category of surveillance art to include literature and other media that are not primarily visual; the deeply-felt influence of scholars of race in general, and Blackness in particular, on both surveillance and literary studies; and a reckoning with “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) as an holistic framework for grasping the forces structuring contemporary surveillance. The article surveys recent work in literary surveillance studies and the essays in the issue, highlighting a shared focus on the affordances of literary work. These affordances include: understanding and responding to historical and contemporary surveillance practices, delineating forms of relationship among the watcher, the watched, and the powers that authorize surveillance, exploring the sensorium made available through narratives of surveillance, narrating resistance under surveillance regimes, and examining the various political projects mobilized by surveillance literature. The introduction maps out the issue’s expansive historical and geographic coverage and indicates how the issue’s authors take up some of surveillance studies’ key concepts. It concludes by gesturing to future directions for literary and surveillance scholars, and to the project of excavating modes of futurity imagined by literary surveillance narratives.
Pervasive tracking of people and the wholesale capture of their data are foundational elements of the data economy. This article explores what opposition to the normalisation of surveillance and commodification of data might entail, with a focus on period-tracking apps, which enable users to monitor their menstrual cycles and identify fertile timeframes to manage pregnancy and symptoms related to menstruation. The article is guided by the following questions: how do period-tracking apps commodify users’ bodily data and how might data decommodification be a response to the harms from period-tracking apps’ data-intensive business models? Designed to make a theoretical intervention and taking a political economy approach, the article develops the concept of data decommodification from Karl Polanyi’s (2001) concept of fictitious commodities. To explore data decommodification, the article comparatively assesses two period-tracking apps, the UK-headquartered Flo Health and the Germany-based Clue, with a focus on their data practices in the United States and European Union, respectively. Data decommodification demands a new set of social relations and government responsibilities in the data economy, including privacy and data protection, the restriction of apps’ trade in health data by regulators, and the prohibition of the commercial trade in health data.
This piece provides an editorial introduction to the special issue on “Resisting Surveillance Through Data Visibility and Invisibility.”
Facial recognition technologies (FRTs) have rapidly expanded as instruments of algorithmic governance, reorganizing regimes of visibility, classification, and control. In Brazil, their diffusion intersects with long-standing racialized forms of urban management, disproportionately targeting Black and peripheral communities under the narrative of enhanced public security. Rather than being supported by evidence of effectiveness, these deployments are driven by techno-solutionist imaginaries that frame technological innovation as the preferred response to structural social issues, enabling experimental systems to circulate with limited legal, social, or technopolitical safeguards. This article examines how Brazilian grassroots organizations and civil society coalitions mobilize to contest this expansion through counter-surveillance practices, legal and policy challenges, public advocacy, and data activism. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research, including sustained engagement with the national campaign Tire Meu Rosto Da Sua Mira, the analysis situates these practices within debates in surveillance studies, science and technology studies (STS), and critical race and feminist approaches to technology. The article argues that resisting FRTs requires not only exposing technical failures but also reshaping the sociotechnical imaginaries that render these systems legitimate. By foregrounding situated resistance emerging at the intersection of racial justice, urban inequality, and data activism, the study shows how these actors contest the normalization of biometric surveillance and articulate alternative, more democratic visions of public security.
The field of surveillance studies is paying growing attention to workplace surveillance, alongside research on state and police surveillance or other social contexts such as prisons, hospitals, or “smart” cities. As the workplace becomes digitalized, a sharp increase is observed in the prevalence and opacity of employee surveillance technologies, which collect a significant amount of data on their behaviours, performance, attitudes, and emotions. This study, conducted in partnership with Quebec’s three main union confederations, analyzes how workers and union representatives make sense of workplace surveillance and resist it. Drawing on focus groups with thirty union representatives and open-ended survey questions answered by 529 workers, we point out their direct and vicarious experiences of exposure to workplace surveillance. We then analyze the process by which they make sense of their exposure through legitimization, attribution to managerial flaws, and metaphorization and at the same time build dark imaginaries of surveillance fraught with guesses, concerns, and fears about the potential opacity, function creep, persistence in time, and privacy invasion of these technologies. This process shapes seven types of individual and collective responses. We position these responses on a continuum from the least to the most potent in restoring data justice by curbing the deployment and use of workplace surveillance. Responses at the individual level comprise indifference, self-protection, and quitting and carry little potency to restore data justice. Responses at the collective level, however, consisting of sensitization, sousveillance, bargaining, and legal action, show large-scale tangible outcomes.
Hardly anywhere are the consequences of data invisibility more life-threatening than at national borders, creating a vicious cycle of surveillance, violence, and death. Sousveillance initiatives challenge this by making violence visible. While their work aims to educate the public about state violence, the complex relationship between sousveillance and visibility needs further exploration. Sousveillance claims to be a communicative act of resistance; assessing this claim requires examining how visibility is produced and what form it assumes. The work of Forensic Architecture (FA), a sousveillance research agency, is fruitful for this, as its investigative videos aim to show how evidence is made. Using comparative video artefact analysis to examine a video in which FA presents its reconstruction of the 2020 shooting of a Syrian refugee at the Turkish-Greek border, this study details the complex, sequential process of producing visibility of violence as evidence. I will show that FA conducts a culturally specific form of analysis in which data interpreting and synthesizing information are carried out by establishing an abstract understanding of space. The visibility produced by FA is inherently ambiguous: It de- and re-subjectivizes, abstracts from social difference, and differentiates the subjects in question. These ambiguities highlight the challenges of negotiating data in/visibility and provide new insights into debates on sousveillance as resistance in the context of state violence.
In 1996, Gloria Naylor (2005) recounts a traumatic encounter with the surveillance state, one that begins with sonic harassment but ends with psychological instability. Uncertain what voices fill her mind, Naylor composes what she calls a fictionalized memoir, which she projects the paranoia of surveillance onto the unstable medium of narrative voice. The indignity of "hearing things," which features prominently in Naylor's story, evokes a critical tradition that ranges from Eve Sedgwick's (1997) theorization paranoia to Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen's (2024) more recent reimagination of "conspiracy/theory." Although this interdisciplinary body of scholarship has established the indelibly literary demeanor of the surveilled life, it has yet to address hearing things as a fundamental problem of the digital world. As this essay argues, 1996 contests state surveillance not by reciprocating the data-collection process, but through fantasies of mystery voices and unverifiable-that is, acousmatic-sounds. The second section of this essay contends that increasingly ubiquitous and imperceptible surveillance technologies have made Naylor's narrative strategy even more essential today. In 2016, American diplomats began to report hearing inexplicable noises well as an array of neurological symptoms that news media have come to name Havana Syndrome. The diplomats' government agencies largely dismissed their symptoms, and the experience of hearing things fell outside the procedures of clinical medicine, leading many to rehabilitate their minds through aesthetic means. This essay links the provocative narrative form of 1996 with the art therapies at Walter Reed Medical Center, before forecasting Naylor's influence on the emerging counter-surveillant practices the digital age.
This article investigates twenty-first-century literary depictions of contestations between the nuclear surveillance infrastructures of two of the largest democracies in the world-the United States and India. Recognizing that these disputes have shaped US-India relations since Indian independence from colonial British rule in 1947, this article examines how themes of deception-central to Cold War spy fiction-appear in contemporary literary works about surveillance conflicts between the two nations. These texts reflect mutual distrust: American surveillance portrays India as an irresponsible postcolonial nuclear power, while Indian countersurveillance depicts the US as a hypocritical and coercive hegemon who enables Pakistan's nuclear program. With reference to these strategic conflicts over the politics and logic of knowledge about nuclear materials, infrastructures, bodies, ideas, and motivations, this article critically analyzes representative texts: an American novel and an Indian novel series-the American diplomat Matthew Palmer's novel Secrets of State (2015) and the Indian novelist Shaunak Agarkhedkar's tetralogy Let Bhutto Eat Grass (2017-2022). In revealing behind-the-scenes machinations of nuclear surveillance, this article highlights how literary productions are key cultural conduits for underscoring the importance of mutual trust in nuclear politics. Such trust, as the texts examined here show, requires moving beyond the rigid cycle of hiding and exposing secrets that has long characterized-and may still define-the tense relationship between two nuclear democracies, the United States of America and India.
How do people negotiate their agency while they are deeply entangled with the reality filtered or revised by the authorities via pervasive surveillance? How does science fiction, or literature in general, identify the issue and stage the confrontation between the watchers and the watched? This paper discusses the politics of silence under surveillance in two Chinese science fiction (SF) stories, Ma Boyong's "The City of Silence" (2005) and Zhang Ran's "Ether" (2012). Placing the texts in the trajectory of Chinese SF's critical reflection of and intervention into social reality, I argue that the two SF stories speak out the unspeakable, literarily and metaphorically, thematically and aesthetically. The unspeakable means a state of being silent due to the probing eyes and ears of technology. In narrative, the stories delineate how silence is imposed and employed as a rejection to the pervasive eyes and ears. While it is a matter of disempowerment, not letting the surveillant hear also disrupts the power of surveillance. In aesthetics, science fiction is a genre that speaks out within the system, in which non-conformist/different voices are silenced. To speak or not speak, hide or not hide, disguise or not disguise: such dilemmas bring up ethical and moral challenges as surveillance is legitimized and normalized.
How can literary works recast visual models of surveillance systems when writing is itself a visual technology? Writing's essential visual affordances mean that novels cannot claim to impart aesthetic experiences that inherently disrupt the surveillant knowledge regimes to which they are bound. Within this article, I outline recent scholarship that troubles this relationship. I compare literary representations of the surveillance state and surveillance resistance in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) to Jeff VanderMeer's experimental, multimodal novel Dead Astronauts (2019). Nineteen Eighty-Four has long been considered outdated, in metaphor and systemic reality. But what more can one expect when the affordances of writing are left unraveled? Dead Astronauts is a text to which we might turn for this undoing. Visual knowledge is taken to task through its form-tactile and visual ways of reading are combined to render the novel's multi-species dialogue around surveillance resistance. Dead Astronauts offers an updated aesthetic approach to how novels can, at the level of form, disrupt visual knowledge systems. It is because the novel experiments with the boundaries of written language that it manages to successfully voice critiques of racialized surveillance capitalism, ecological crisis, and the failure of anthropocentric priorities in resistance movements. An allegorical cast of non-human, chimeric characters are exploited by the novel's formal structure, enacting surveillance capitalism's extraction of data's raw materials: mind, imagination, and future behavior. The novel's form is a cipher that troubles whether a readerly interest in solution begets reward. Dead Astronauts shows that exemplary surveillance novels must do more than mirror the warping nature of a multisensory surveillance assemblage through traditional narrative. Multimodal novels that thoroughly metabolize algorithmic surveillance via the proximal dissection of language might recruit resistant, critical subjects, or readers who understand that visuality is a limited paradigm for perceiving a future whose face we increasingly fail to recognize.
This article examines how early nineteenth-century British novels employed horizontal surveillance-peer-based observation-to regulate women's behavior and reinforce social norms. Focusing on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1833 [1811]) and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1824 [1801]), it explores how different sensory modes of scrutiny-auditory in Austen's world of whispered speculation, gossip, and overhearing, and visual in Edgeworth's depiction of public spectacle-converge to produce a rich vocabulary of social control. Although separated by distinct social milieus, both authors responded to the shifting cultures of surveillance in the Romantic period, forging literary frameworks that anticipate both Victorian social policing and our own era's digitally mediated modes of communal monitoring. Austen's Marianne Dashwood and Edgeworth's Harriet Freke emerge as instructive figures: Marianne's emotional openness and Harriet's nonconformity each invite intense scrutiny, compelling them and those around them to internalize regulatory norms. However, both also enact forms of resistance: one rooted in sincerity, the other in performance and defiance. As the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth occurred in December 2025, re-examining these novels through surveillance theory highlights their continued relevance. These novels illuminate how informal systems of social control operated across time and how women's responses to surveillance can be both constrained and strategic.
This article explores the interplay between theological and utilitarian conceptions of omniscience and moral accountability through a comparative analysis of hymns from Swedish trial services (1686-1989) and Jeremy Bentham's writings on surveillance architecture, particularly the chapel, examining how they illuminate contrasting frameworks for transforming human behavior under an omniscient gaze. While Lutheran hymns depict God's omniscience as a transcendent, relational presence fostering repentance and spiritual renewal through divine grace, Bentham's panopticon reimagines omniscience as a secular mechanism of behavioral regulation, achieved through perpetual surveillance. The analysis identifies thematic as well as social parallels-such as the transformative impact of observation and the role of moral reform-while highlighting key divergences. Hymns emphasize voluntary spiritual transformation anchored in divine mercy, whereas the panopticon enforces conformity through external pressure and institutional control. Theological reflections on omniscience, omnipresence, and justice in the hymns underscore a relational and redemptive paradigm, in contrast to the panopticon's utilitarian focus on societal order and efficiency. This study contributes to previous research and the interdisciplinary discourse on surveillance, ethics, and religion, revealing how theological and secular paradigms of observation shape divergent understandings of justice, moral accountability, and human transformation.
This article argues that literature offers distinctive ways of theorizing and resisting surveillance by foregrounding multisensory experience, materiality, and human-nonhuman entanglement. Within surveillance studies, resistance is often framed through visual or data-centric practices such as sousveillance, stealth, or counter-monitoring. By contrast, literary texts can disrupt surveillance at the level of perception itself. Focusing on Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know (2014), the article proposes a multisensory ecological aesthetics of resistance that shifts attention away from visibility and human agency toward atmosphere, ordinary matter, and nonhuman actors. Through recurring motifs of dust, air, and smell, the novel challenges colonial and anthropocentric regimes that seek to render environments and bodies fully legible. These sensory and material elements generate forms of opacity and relationality that exceed the visual and informational logics of surveillance. By reading literature as a multisensory medium that reconfigures how surveillance is perceived and contested, the article shows how literary analysis expands surveillance studies beyond visuality and toward an ecological understanding of resistance.
This article examines how modern ideas about and experiences with surveillance were formed in twentieth-century Iran by close reading and contextualizing the first modern science fiction in Persian literature, written by 'Abd al-Hosayn San'atiz & amacr;da in 1937 in Iran. This novella, Rostam in the Twenty-second Century, is a humorous commentary on the emerging modern surveillance in Pahlavi Iran. This article analyses the novella's narrative strategies as a lens into the formation of Pahlavi surveillance. It begins by outlining the rudimental development of a surveillance regime as the state increasingly sought to monitor and control the public sphere, regulating not only people's appearance and behavior but also their understanding of the past and their collective memory. Drawing from media theory, this state-based development is conceptualized as "surveillance dispositive," which aims to detail how the Pahlavi state apparatus remediated and enforced a new national literary heritage as a strategy to observe and control the Iranian populations. The article then examines how this surveillance dispositif shaped emerging social experiences with state supervision and control. Drawing on surveillance studies and taking the novella as the primary object of analysis, it invokes the concept of the "surveillance imaginary" to elucidate how Iranian society grappled with a new condition of being watched under the Pahlavi surveillance regime. The novella is shown to diagram a narrative abstraction that reveals the relationship between the surveillance dispositif and its corresponding imaginary.
