About Me

I am the Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies at the University of Ottawa, a full Professor in the Department of Criminology, and a Faculty Member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS), and the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS). I am also a Visiting Professor at the new Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, and the Centre d’études sur les technologies de surveillance (CETHICS) at the Catholic University of Lille, France.

I’m a founding editor and current Co-Editor-in-Chief of Surveillance & Society, the international, open access, peer-reviewed journal of surveillance studies, and a founder-member and a member of the Board of Directors of the Surveillance Studies Network. I was the Chair of the Organizing Committee for the 10th biennial Surveillance Studies Network / Surveillance & Society conference #SSN2024, 28-31 May 2024, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

My main research interests right now are around smartness, what I call platform cities, AI and ambient intelligence, and the emergence of a planetary surveillance society. I am about to launch a podcast called Cities at the End of the World, which is also the title of the book I am currently working on.  There is a lot more about my publications here.

Some History…

I left Queen’s University at Kingston in 2022. For the final year I was there, I was Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre (SSC), a brilliant little research centre set up and sustained for many years by David Lyon and Elia Zureik (RIP). I spent most of that year trying to save the centre and then closing it down because of the short-sightedness of the faculty and university administration.

Between 2009 and 2019 I was Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Surveillance Studies in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s. I was also previously part of the Big Data Surveillance SSHRC Partnership, and The New Transparency Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) in the SSC.

Until 31st August 2009, I was Reader in Surveillance Studies  at the Global Urban Research Unit (GURU) at Newcastle University in the UK. I was the co-initiator, with William Webster, of the  European Science Foundation COST action, Living in Surveillance Societies’ (LiSS) and I had an ESRC Research Fellowship for a project called ‘Cultures of Urban Surveillance’ which looked at the globalization of surveillance across different countries. This project continued into the first 5 years of my CRC at Queen’s.

As part of the project, in 2013-14, I spent ten months in Japan as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Invitation Fellow, based at the School of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe, but also working with folks from the Centre for Business Information Ethics at Meiji University in Tokyo. Connected to the same project, I had previously been a Visiting Fellow the Pontifical Catholic University of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil and a Visiting Scholar at Waseda University, in Tokyo. I also returned to Tokyo in 2019, as a fellow of the Japan Foundation, to look at security preparations for the 2020 Olympics, that did not take place because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition I’ve been a Visiting Professor in the Philosophy Section at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, and what’s now the School of Digital Design and Information Studies at the University of Aarhus and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, both in Denmark.

Prior to all this, back in 2006 I coordinated the influential Report on the Surveillance Society for the UK Information Commissioner (ICO) – and was part of the team for a short follow-up report which came out in 2013. Way, way back, from 1997-2001, I did my PhD work under Rachel Woodward at Newcastle University on ‘The Hidden Geographies of Transnational Surveillance’, a thesis which examined US National Security Agency (NSA) bases in the UK and worldwide, and for a couple of years after this I worked under Steve Graham, at the Global Urban Research Unit at Newcastle, on my postdoc project entitled ‘Algorithmic Surveillance and Social Exclusion’ (2002-2003) back when few in social sciences had heard of algorithms or big data…

Even further back, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I studied Modern History at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. During this time and for many years after I was an environmental, peace and indigenous rights direct action activist, also working with pressure groups and political parties, particularly the short-lived but I think pretty influential, Earth Action Resource Centre (Earth ARC), Earth First!, Stop the War Machine, Oxfam and the Green Party of England and Wales. I later taught English in Japan, and then did an MSc is Rural Resource and Countryside Management at Newcastle, where I also taught Environmental Management, Ecological Economics and Alternative Approaches to Rural Development.