Publications

Out Now or Coming Soon…

In 2025, I have finally had a year worth celebrating in terms of publications.

Firstly, I had a short essay on (dis)connection come out:

Wood, D.M. (2025) Only (dis)connect: Facing the intertwined (in)security of self, systems and society, First Monday 30(8). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v30i8.13776

I finished a couple of things with Prof. Azadeh Akbari of the Centre for Critical Computational Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt:

Akbari, A. and D.M. Wood (2025) Towards a Critical Political Economy of Surveillance and Digital Authoritarianism, Special Dialogue Section on Surveillance and Authoritarianism, Surveillance & Society 23(1): 152–158. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v23i1.18917

Akbari, A. and D.M. Wood (forthcoming 2025) Smart Cities as Control Cities, for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society.

I’ve also finished a couple of things from my main project,

Wood, D.M. (2025) Post-smart cities as digital authoritarian polities: a geopolitical sociology of the Praxis Network State, Dialogues on Digital Society, special issue on Authoritarianism in the Digital Age, 1(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640251377168

Wood, D.M. (forthcoming November 2025) Platform City People, in V. Steeves and B. Roessler (eds.) Being Human in the Digital World, Cambridge University Press.

And I have another piece coming out from this work:

Wood, D.M. (forthcoming) Total surveillance as a civilizational stage: Surveillance and science-fiction in the ideology of the tech oligarchy. Science as Culture, special section on Ideologies of Tech Oligarchs.

Finally, I have a (very) long piece on surveillance and transatlantic science fiction coming out in a special issue of Surveillance & Society on surveillance literature in early 2026:

Wood, D.M. (forthcoming March 2026) Something changed? Surveillance and security in transatlantic Science Fiction novels after 9/11. Surveillance & Society, 24(1).

Previous Work

Below is a list of things I’ve written previously that I think are worth your time to read, organized by rough themes:

Historical Development of Urban Surveillance

Coaffee, J., D. Murakami Wood and P. Rogers (2009) The Everyday Resilience of the City. Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

The book Jon Coaffee, Pete Rogers and I wrote, which I think is still a really strong work on urban security, insecurity and surveillance (rather than resilience per se, despite the title). Not many people read it at the time, perhaps because of the title, but it is increasingly being cited and being seen as influential. I think the historical chapters I wrote on the development are actually pretty good. There is a kind of summary of what I thought about all this in this chapter:

Murakami Wood, D. (2010) ‘Urban Insecurity,’ in J. Peter Burgess (ed.) Handbook of New Security Studies, London: Routledge.

Surveillance and Technology

Murakami Wood, D. (2015) ‘Vanishing Surveillance: ghost hunting in the ubiquitous surveillance society’, in K. Veel and H. Steiner (eds.), Negotiating (In)visibilities, New York / Bern: Peter Lang.

Murakami Wood, D. (2008) ‘Towards Spatial Protocol: the topologies of the pervasive surveillance society’, in A. Aurigi F. De Cindio (eds.) Augmented Urban Spaces. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 93-106.

These two chapters on spatial protocol and vanishing surveillance (the 2015 chapter being a deliberate follow-up to the older piece, albeit written in a different style), are probably a pretty good summary of my views on surveillance and technology until recently.

Murakami Wood, D. and Graham, S. (2006) ‘Permeable Boundaries in the Software-sorted Society: Surveillance and the Differentiation of Mobility’, in M. Sheller and J. Urry (eds.) Mobile Technologies of the City. London / New York: Routledge, 177-191.

Introna, L. and D. Wood (2004) ‘Picturing Algorithmic Surveillance: The Politics of Facial Recognition Systems’, Surveillance & Society, 2(2/3): 177-198. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3373

Graham, S. and D. Wood (2003) ‘Digitising Surveillance: Categorisation, Space, Inequality’, Critical Social Policy, 23(2): 227-248.

These three early collaborative pieces all deal with algorithms and what would now be called ‘big data’. I think they stand up pretty well. ‘Digitising Surveillance’ (with Steve Graham) was until recently my most cited work – well, anyone doing work on digital surveillance, algorithms, big data etc. SHOULD have read it ;-), but recently the piece on facial recognition with Lucas Introna has overtaken it, and I think it’s finally being seen as the path-breaking work that it was.

Surveillance Capitalism and Platform Surveillance

Eliot, D. and D. Murakami Wood. (2022) Culling the FLoC: Market forces, regulatory regimes and Google’s (mis)steps on the path away from targeted advertising, Information Polity, special issue on Questioning Modern Surveillance Technologies, 27(2): 259-274. https://content.iospress.com/articles/information-polity/ip211535

Rider, K. and Murakami Wood, D. (2019) ‘Condemned to Connection? Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Manifesto and the Authoritarian Turn,’ New Media & Society 21(3): 639–654. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818804772

Murakami Wood, D. and D. Mackinnon (2019) ‘Partial platforms and oligoptic surveillance in the smart city,’ Surveillance & Society (special issue on Platform Surveillance) 17(1/2): 176–182. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.13116

Murakami Wood, D. (2013) ‘What is Global Surveillance? Towards a Relational Political Economy of the Global Surveillant Assemblage’, Geoforum 49: 317–326.

Murakami Wood, D and Ball, K. (2013) ‘Brandscapes of Control: Surveillance, marketing and the co-construction of subjectivity and space in neo-liberal capitalism’, Marketing Theory 13(1): 47-67.

These two 2013 theoretical papers, the latter written with the brilliant Kirstie Ball, aren’t read enough. Of course I would say that, but I think they both in different ways get to the heart of the development of what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. There are a number of other pieces I’ve written that deal with aspects of this, including:

Murakami Wood, D. (2017) ‘Spatial Sorting’, in R. Kitchin, T.P. Lauriault, M.W. Wilson (eds.) Understanding Spatial Media. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.

Murakami Wood, D. (2010) ‘Spies in the Information Economy: Academic Publishers and the Trade in Personal Information’, ACME (special issue on Corporate Involvement in Geography) 8(3): 484-493. http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/846

Cultures of Urban Surveillance

Murakami Wood, D. (2020) ‘Resisting or Recapturing Surveillance?’ in C. Levine-Rasky and L. Kowalchuk (eds.) We Resist! Defending the Common Good in Hostile Times. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Murakami Wood, D. and Abe, K. (2012) ‘The Aesthetics of Control: Mega-Events and Urban Governance in Japan’, Urban Studies, special issue on The City, Sport Mega-Events and Security (eds. Richard Giulianotti and Francisco Klauser) 48(15): 3241-3258.

Murakami Wood, D. and Abe, K. (2011) ‘The Spectacle of Fear: Anxious Events and Foreign Threats in Japan’, in C. Bennett and K. Haggerty (eds.) Security Games, London / New York: Routledge.

Murakami Wood, D., D. Lyon and K. Abe (2007) ‘Surveillance in Urban Japan: A Critical Introduction’, Urban Studies 44(3): 551-568.

A series of pieces written with Kiyoshi Abe (and David Lyon) on the development of surveillance in Japan. The pieces try to develop a theoretical approach that isn’t dominated by western academic theory, drawing on Japanese sociologists and concepts as well as western ones.

Murakami Wood, D. (2013) ‘The Security Dimension’, in M. Acuto and W. Steele (eds.) Global City Challenges, Basingstoke UK: Palgrave.

Murakami Wood, D. (2011) ‘Cameras in Context: A Comparison of the Place of Video Surveillance in Japan and Brazil’ in A. Doyle, R. Lippert and D. Lyon (eds.) Eyes Everywhere: the Global Spread of Video Surveillance. London / New York: Routledge.

Murakami Wood, D. (2011) ‘Surveillance’, in Taylor, B. Derudder, M. Hoyler and F. Witlox (eds.) International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities, New York: Edward Elgar.

These three pieces are comparative ones dealing with the research I did in Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and to a lesser extent, London. The chapter, ‘The Security Dimension’, I had originally called ‘Global cities between biopolitics and necropolitics’, and it was later republished under that title in Roger Keil’s Handbook of Globalizing Cities. You should still be able to read it under that title at researchgate. I don’t always like what I write, but I really like this piece.

Murakami Wood, D. (2009) ‘The Surveillance Society: Questions of History, Place and Culture’, for European Journal of Criminology (special issue on Surveillance in Europe, ed. Ben Goold) 6(2): 179-194.

This piece sets out the general thinking behind my approach in the Cultures of Urban Surveillance project.

Planetary Surveillance

Murakami Wood, D. (2017) ‘Urban surveillance after the end of the era of globalization,’ in J. Rennie Short (ed.) A Research Agenda for Cities. New York: Edward Elgar.

Murakami Wood, D. (2012) ‘Surveillance and Globalization’ in D. Lyon, K. Haggerty, and K. Ball (eds.) International Handbook of Surveillance Studies, London / New York: Routledge.

Donaldson, A. and D. Wood (2004) ‘Surveilling Strange Materialities: categorization in the evolving geographies of FMD biosecurity in the UK’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(3): 373 – 391.

I’m not particularly happy with the 2017 chapter but it’s a start in laying out where I am currently going combining economic globalism, ubiquitous surveillance, the Anthropocene and ecological meltdown. The piece for the Handbook of Surveillance Studies bridges the gap between my Cultures of Urban Surveillance work, the stuff on Surveillance Capitalism and newer work on what I am now calling ‘Planetary Surveillance’. There was supposed to be a book, The Watched World, but I still have not got around to writing it. The paper written with Andrew Donaldson, who is now at GURU in Newcastle, was my first real attempt to get to grips with all this at a very different scale, and is actually much better (probably entirely due to Andrew…). We also wrote a shorter follow-up which was speaking much more directly to geographers:

Donaldson, A. and D. Murakami Wood (2008) ‘Avian Influenza and the Shape of a Political Biogeography’, Area 40(1): 128-130.

Editorials

I’ve written a number of editorials for Surveillance & Society over the years, solo and jointly, all of which have something important to say. Editorials by their nature are shorter, more polemic and often don’t last as well over time, but I think these ones are all worth revisiting, particularly the longer ones from 2017, 2015, 2012, 2010 and 2004, which are trying to set out contexts and agendas for future work:

Murakami Wood, D and V. Steeves (2021) ‘Smart Surveillance.’ Surveillance & Society 19(2): 150-153. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/14916

Murakami Wood, D. and T. Monahan (2019) ‘Platform Surveillance.’ Surveillance & Society 17(1/2): 1-6. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/13237

Murakami Wood, D. (2017) ‘The global turn to authoritarianism and after’, Surveillance & Society 15(3/4): 357-370. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/6835

Murakami Wood, D. and S. Wright (2015) ‘Before and After Snowden’, Surveillance & Society 13(2): 132-138. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/snowden_editorial

Ball, K. and D. Murakami Wood (2013) ‘Political Economies of Surveillance’, Surveillance & Society 11(1/2): 1-3. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/issue/view/Futures

Lippert, R. and D. Murakami Wood (2012) ‘New Urban Surveillance: Technology, Mobility, and Diversity in 21st Century Cities’, Surveillance & Society 9(3): 257-262. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/issue/view/Urban

Monahan, T., D.J. Phillips & D. Murakami Wood (2010). ‘Surveillance and Empowerment’, Surveillance & Society 8(2): 106-112. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/issue/view/Empowerment

Murakami Wood, D. (2009) ‘Questions of Surveillance’, Surveillance & Society 7(1): 1-2. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/issue/view/Open%202009

Murakami Wood, D. (2009) ‘A New Baroque Arsenal? Surveillance in a Global Recession’, Surveillance & Society 6(1): 1-4. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/issue/view/Relaunch/showToc

Wood, D. (2004) ‘People Watching People.’ Surveillance & Society 2(4): 474-7. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3358

Norris, C., M. McCahill and D. Wood (2004) ‘The Growth of CCTV: a global perspective on the international diffusion of video surveillance in publicly accessible space,’ Surveillance & Society 2(2/3): 110-135. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3369