Re-imagining Everyday Carcerality in an Age of Digital Surveillance

Abstract

This dissertation project takes an interdisciplinary approach towards theorizing how we understand new modes of incarceration and confinement in the digital age. It makes key interventions in the fields of surveillance studies, carceral studies, critical data and technology studies, ethnic and racial studies. I argue that less conventional modes of incarceration and confinement, which are enabled through technologies, the Internet and processes of datafication, conceal the everyday carceral functions that target and exploit racialized people. Chapter 1 examines mobile carceral technologies that are part of Canada’s immigration and detention system. I investigate how notions of increased freedom that are associated with carceral technologies like electronic monitoring and voice reporting do not necessarily coincide with increased autonomy. In Chapter 2, I consider the relationship between mobile phone cameras and the rise of police body-worn cameras. More specifically, I examine how policing and surveillance technologies disproportionately take aim at Black people and communities, making the mere occupation of public and digital space extremely precarious. Lastly, in Chapter 3, I challenge the notion that biometric systems and technologies are race-neutral guarantors of identity, specifically within the polemical space of the modern airport. I argue that the airport’s security and surveillance infrastructure operates according to racialized knowledges, which unofficially validate the profiling of Muslim travelers by both human and non-human operators.