The Haunting of Surveillance Studies: Seeing, Knowing, and Ghostly Apparitions

Abstract

This paper explores the relevance of a ghost methodology for surveillance studies. Following Torin Monahan’s (2021) call to unsettle transparency as a metric or goal of surveillance studies and inspired by Michelle Brown’s (2022) demand that criminology exorcise the ghosts of white supremacy, I draw upon a 2020 case of a police-involved death of a racialized woman in Toronto to consider the haunting absence of images that are usually called upon to offer evidence what “really” happened. Against the desire to make this death empirically knowable, a ghost method asks us to live with the “eerie” remnants of violence as palpable presences that require of us a reckoning. The spectral presence of white supremacy that looms over the ghostly absence of Regis Korchinski-Paquet can lead us to a form of redress consistent with abolitionist ways of seeing. Thus, I seek to break the impasse of debates over the costs or benefits of increased transparency by outlining how a ghost methodology can help to decentre surveillance studies’ preoccupation with visibility in favour of a more nuanced appreciation of haunting and absence.

Revitalizing Dissent: Imperatives for Critical Surveillance Inquiry

“…This includes reflexively interrogating how positionalities are encoded into our assumptions about scholarship on surveillance (Ball and Graham 2022;Brayne 2022), and it also means inviting critical viewpoints and voices across fields, cultures, and geographies (Firmino and Bruno 2022;Kapadia and Beauchamp 2022;Lyon 2022). Another theme is one of methodological experimentation, which could include literary or artistic approaches, such as "speculative fabulation" (Veel and Wellendorf 2022) or "ghost methodology" of tracing hidden violence (Glasbeek 2022), or it could include innovations to empirically study-and theorize-secretive policing and security apparatuses or algorithmic processes (Brayne 2022). 10 A final theme is that of maintaining a critical focus on issues of power, inequality, domination, and violence, particularly as the technological and institutional landscapes shift (Andrejevic 2022;Ball 2022;Crooks 2022;Fussey 2022;Orr and Magnet 2022;Marwick 2022;Sadowski 2022), authoritarianisms resurge (Akbari 2022), and environmental and health crises grow (Browne, Klauser, and Murakami Wood 2022;Sung 2022).…”

Review of Madörin’s Postcolonial Surveillance: Europe’s Border Technologies Between Colony and Crisis

“…Postcolonial Surveillance is an eloquent and haunting exploration that unravels the intricate tapestry of migration crises, border technologies, and colonial echoes. As mentioned by Glasbeek (2022), the "trap of visuality" is becoming increasingly necessary to be understood in surveillance studies, placing us in an urgent position to create temporal and spatial methodologies and analyses capable of seeing the presences of colonialism, enslavement, and patriarchy. And Postcolonial Surveillance excels at accomplishing this.…”

Review of Yonucu’s Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul

“…The book describes how Devrimova residents are pressured to work as undercover police officers or informants but refuse collaboration in a publicly defiant manner. The book deploys the concept of inspirational hauntings to illustrate how Devrimovans find the courage to resist becoming collaborators, which has relevance for the emerging "ghost methodology" in surveillance studies (see Glasbeek 2022). Inspirational hauntings are "the hauntings of past resistance and of rebellious and defiant subjects who seep into the present and serve as encouraging and emboldening political, ethical, and spiritual resources" (121).…”