The Surveillance Studies Centre, 2000-2022.

This page is here really simply to provide a link to the archive of the Surveillance Studies Centre (SSC) at Queen’s University:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-1149/20231011203824/https://www.surveillance-studies.ca/

But I thought I might also offer some reflections. Although the SSC is not mine to claim in any way – that honour goes entirely to the founder, and director for most of SSC’s existence: Professor David Lyon. However, one of the saddest tasks I have had to carry out in academia was the closure of the SSC. It’s pretty much what I spent my last year doing at the university, the only year I was the director.

For the entire previous year, the then incoming deputy director, Alana Saulnier, and I spent exploring many different options for how the SSC might be able to continue. We looked at models for small centres across Canada and beyond, for multi-university centres, for all kinds of options. We explored being merged into something bigger within Queen’s. We produced a report and made proposals for the centre to operate as a virtual entity. But the fundamental problems were 1. the SSC had no money, and no big grant in prospect to keep it going and pay its longstanding staff, Joan Sharpe and Emily Smith; and 2. Queen’s had changed the rules about what constituted a centre, and the SSC, regardless of its reputation and success, was just too small to qualify. But the SSC was successful and did –still does– have a global reputation. That’s what was so hard to take for those of us who worked there.

The Surveillance Studies Centre was started in 2000, by David Lyon and the late Elia Zureik, and it began long before I was involved, as The Surveillance Project. It became a centre within the Department of Sociology in 2009, and eventually a faculty-level centre within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It was a pillar of the emergence of Surveillance Studies as a transdisciplinary field, with David Lyon being one of the originators of this field, as well as being one of the five scholars that created the journal, Surveillance & Society (with Kirstie Ball, Clive Norris, Steve Graham, and I, all then based in the UK), and then the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN).

The SSC nurtured a lot of MA and PhD students, to the extent that at some points it was really underpinning the Sociology graduate programme at Queen’s. As the centre expanded, its students started to come from Law, Geography, and Cultural Studies, not just from Sociology, and there were collaborations with departments and centres from History through Neurosciences to Computing, but Sociology remained its home. These students went everywhere: many are now tenured professors and most are still very much involved in Surveillance Studies. There were visitors from all over the world. There were really important research projects and partnerships, from the Globalization of Personal Data, through the Surveillance Camera Action Network and the New Transparency, to Big Data Surveillance. There were debates and seminars, art exhibitions, the amazing Screening Surveillance film series, and more…

The outputs of these are all still available to peruse on the archived site, which remains as it was as of 3 years ago, in 2023.

https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-1149/20231011203824/https://www.surveillance-studies.ca/

Things change. Research centres and project come and go. Academia is a collective enterprise and Surveillance Studies has never been stronger, more diverse or more global. But please don’t forget the Surveillance Studies Centre. And use the archive!

Platform City People

Finally published! I have a chapter, ‘Platform City People’, out in this fully *open access* book, Being Human in the Digital World, edited by Val Steeves and Beate Roessler, from Cambridge. Please read everything in it.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/being-human-in-the-digital-world/platform-city-people/00049338349668A16F48038DDCC42769

It’s a piece about how the developers and promoters of what we might call post-smart cities, platform cities or AI cities see the putative inhabitants of these exclusive and exclusionary places. I wrote this quite a while ago now, and in a deliberately accessible style, and more than a little bit polemical, satirical and sarcastic in its tone. I think it still stands up well.

The whole book is here, and it also includes great things from the likes of Frank Pasquale, Julie Cohen and Azadeh Akbari amongst many others…

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/being-human-in-the-digital-world/D8CC33CF026507F324AF00CEEC7C894C

Ambient Government Revisited

A few years ago I was talking around the place about surveillance, security and “ambient government” (or “ambient governance”), but it turned out that so were plenty of other people and no one person really has a claim on this phrase or others like it. It was, somewhat appropriate, in the academic air at the time… and it still should be!

Looking back on it, I don’t think I’ve bettered how I discussed this back then, and I never fully published what I was talking about. So here is the vastly underwatched talk I gave in Victoria back in 2014. If you have 45 minutes to spare, I think it’s worth a watch. Plus, I look so young!

Call: PLANETARY SURVEILLANCE #SSN2026

Call for Abstracts / Panels

PLANETARY SURVEILLANCE

The 11th Biennial Surveillance Studies Network / Surveillance & Society Conference #SSN2026

9-12 June 2026 Université Catholique de Lille, France

Our next conference will take place in the city of Lille, northern France. It’s being run by the folks at CETHICS / ISTC. The main Conference will take place over 3 full days from 10-12 June, with a pre-conference doctoral colloquium occurring on 9 June. And there will probably be other events around the conference to be confirmed…

All in-person sessions from the main conference will be streamed online, and there will also be a dedicated online track with remote presentations for presenters who cannot attend in-person.

As usual, while there is a headline theme, anything to do with surveillance / surveillance studies, goes…

Details: surveillance-studies.net/conference/

Submissions (open soon): ssn2026.sciencesconf.org

Global Governance of Post-Smart Cities workshop

I am decompressing after our Global Governance of Post-Smart Cities workshop last week: a fabulous few days of discussion at the intersection of space, cities, political economy, history, media and technology. There was no audience, no preconceived outcome, just some of my favourite scholars brought together for a few gorgeous autumn days in Ottawa to talk about ideas. This is what academia should be about but very rarely is.

The concept of the “post-smart city” is a deliberately provocative term, which I and several others have proposed, and which I am exploring in my current research. What I am trying to capture here is the plethora of different things that seems to be emerging out of the concept of the smart city, e.g. Platform Cities, AI Cities, Super Cities, Cognitive Cities, right through to weirdness like the Network State, and the bringing then together with libertarian and national projects for new cities as permanent experiments. I am thinking of “post-” very much in the sense of “post-modern” or “post-structural” in which the “post-” doesn’t indicate that the thing has been superseded but that it includes and builds on it taking it in new directions. However, I am also thinking of Latour’s critique that “we have never been modern.” Maybe we are in a post-smart situation, but have never really been smart… In any case, as a provocation for discussion, it worked really well in this context.

The main sessions were as follows:

  • “Zones of Interest” – Neoliberal Cities
  • “My Own Private Idaho” – Libertarian Cities
  • “From the Internet, Up” – Platform and Media Cities
  • “Fitter, Happier, More Productive…” – From Smart to AI Cities
  • “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss” – (Post-)Colonial Cities
  • “Cleaner, Greener, Meaner…” – (Un)Sustainable Cities
  • “A New Life Awaits You in the Offworld Colonies” – Extraplanetary Cities

I originally gave a prompt for each and encouraged the leaders of each session to do what they wanted with the subject. In the end, most adopted a fairly conventional presentation and discussion format, and the discussion was great but I am wondering how to do things even more differently next time:

There was a also a public event, on the first evening of the workshop, Rethinking our Futures in an Age of Crisis, featuring Quinn Slobodian, Ayona Datta, Orit Halphen and Nick Couldry in conversation with me. There will be further reflections and eventually a full report published by CIGI Online.

An enormous thank-you to…

My co-organizers: Vincent Mirza and Azadeh Akbari.

Those who accepted our curious invitation: Rowland Atkinson, Ilia Antenucci, Yung Au, Kelly Bronson, Nick Couldry, Raymond Craib, Federico Cugurullo, Ayona Datta, Mehdi Ghassemi, Orit Halpern, Olivier Jutel, Roger Keil, Casey Lynch, Tim Maughan, Kevin McMillan, Carolyn Prouse, Renée Sieber, Isabelle Simpson, Quinn Slobodian, Alina Utrata, Niloufar Vadiati, Catherine Vandermeulen, Dwayne Winseck, Liam Cole Young.

CSS/Lab and CLTS grads and postdocs: Jennie Day, David Eliot, Zimo Meng, Claire Wang, Aiden Bradley and Gabriella di Biaggi.

Those who wanted to be here but were unable to come because of inequitable visa and immigration systems and the climate of fear: Hend Ali and Ahmed M Eleish.

Our funders: SSHRC-CRSH Connection Grants, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and the Research Center for the Future of Cities, and the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS), both at the University of Ottawa.

Post-Smart Cities as Digital Authoritarian Polities

I have a short piece out in the excellent new journal, Dialogues on Digital Society, which takes a brief look at the right-wing politics of the Praxis Network State initiative…

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640251377168

My piece is fully open access and free to read, download etc.

This is part of an excellent special issue of almost 50 short pieces on digital authoritarianism by lots of excellent folks, which are being published online first as they are finished. Read them all!

Only (dis)connect…

I have a short essay on the obsession with connection and its conjoined ethical and cybersecurity problems, just out in First Monday, “Only (dis)connect…”

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13776

This piece was originally written on request (and at very short notice) for an edited collection, and then was unexpectedly rejected by the editors who had requested it. Anyway, now instead of being in a book that few people will read, it’s in journal that anyone and everyone can read…

First Monday is one of those genuinely open access, no APCs, journals that appears on my list of radical open access journals in the social sciences that we should support.

Canada Postdoctoral Research Award 2025 Opportunity

I’m looking for an outstanding near complete or complete PhD, to apply for a prestigious Canada Postdoctoral Research Award to work with me in CSS/Lab at the uOttawa. The Award is worth up to $70,000 CAD for 2 years, and you would start in the second half of 2026, if successful.

Candidates would be working on a project of their choice within one of three broad areas:

1. Surveillance, security and post-smart cities – looking at plans for and development of AI-driven private cities and special zones.

2. Hired hackers and private spies – working on the proliferation of private surveillance companies worldwide.

3. Surveillance and the planetary polycrisis – looking at the surveillance implications and issues in global environmental management

Candidates should either already be working in one of these areas and be familiar with the literature.

uOttawa particularly encourages candidates from under-represented and equity-seeking groups.

The successful candidate would be able to be associated with

Please see the details of the program here:

https://sshrc-crsh.canada.ca/en/funding/opportunities/canada-postdoctoral-research-award-program.aspx

The deadline for the full application is 11 September 2025, so I need expressions of interest, including a letter and CV sent to me by the end of July (July 31st 2025), so that I can work with the chosen candidate during August.

to: david.mw [at] uottawa [dot] ca

Smart Cities in China, Taiwan and Singapore

I’ve just been awarded a year-long SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant, which is surveying and summarizing the literature on (post-)smart cities from China, Taiwan and Singapore, in both Chinese and English languages.

Smart digital technologies are challenging the way we manage and govern our cities, and our imagination of their futures. The combination of technological, policy and social innovation in smart and now, post-smart cities generates both common global concerns and issues of policy-learning, co-operation and competition for Canada. China and the sinophone world are at the core of this cooperation and competition conundrum, with China being one of the largest developers of smart cities and smart technology in the world. This project will create a comprehensive database of national smart and post-smart city academic literature, national and sub-national policies and plans in Chinese and English, for China, Taiwan, and Singapore, with literature and policy summaries and reviews, and a program of government and policy and seminars. The work will be conducted by a combined team of native Chinese and English speakers at CSS/Lab. It is aimed at orienting Canadian policy on the governance of cities and technology, nationally and globally.

These three nation-states are vital to understanding the future governance of post-smart cities. China is a driving force of the worldwide market in the smart city sector, making up 13.8% of the global market in 2023, and estimated to grow from $103Bn US in 2023 and is to $550Bn US in 2030 These three nation-states are vital to understanding the future governance of post-smart cities. China is a driving force of the worldwide market in the smart city sector, making up 13.8% of the global market in 2023, and estimated to grow from $103Bn US in 2023 and is to $550Bn US in 2030 (according to Grand View Research), and with three cities in the Top 20 of the 2024 IMD Smart City Index (and a total of 10 in the Top 100). Singapore is the model for many other developers of post-smart cities, ranked 5th in the world in the 2024 IMD Smart City Index, and is itself a massive market for its size at almost 2% of the global total and estimated to grow from $14.4Bn US in 2023 to $102.0Bn US in 2030 (Grand View Research). Finally, Taiwan offers innovative policies on connected citizenship and state management of data (Chung et al. 2021), with Taipei ranked 16th in the 2024 IMD Smart City Index (IMD 2024). In contrast, despite some high-profile policies like the Smart Cities Challenge program, there are no Canadian Cities in the Top 20, or even the Top 40, of the 2024 IMD Smart City Index.  

There are two types of literature involved here in two different domains.

The first is scholarship. The applicant is already conducting extensive literature reviews of the anglophone and francophone literatures on smart and post-smart cities. Both the active planning and construction of smart and post-smart cities, and the study of smart and post-smart cities, are booming in the sinophone (Chinese-language) world, yet in the west, we are limited to presentations and publications by authors who have chosen to publish in conference proceedings and journals in languages other than Chinese, mainly English. We, in Canada, are therefore missing a great deal of research, which would also tell us more about sinophone understandings of the future governance of cities. This project would carry out a systematic cataloging of the Chinese-language literature on smart and post-smart cities, including translation of all titles, abstracts and keywords. 

The second is policy. The project also proposes to collate, catalog and summarize national and sub-national policy documents on smart and post-smart cities from China, Taiwan and Singapore, the three predominantly (or at least, partly) culturally Chinese governments. This project would carry out a systematic cataloging of Chinese, Taiwanese and Singaporean policy literature, that is policy documents, white papers, official discussion documents, national plans and competitions and so on, concerning smart and post-smart cities, including translation of all titles, summaries and keywords. Where summaries do not exist, they will be provided. 

Together this project offers vital resources that are important for our collective global imagination, but also in the immediate term for orienting Canadian domestic policy on the governance of cities and technology, nationally and globally.