Speaker: Prof. Pete Fussey, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex (UK)

Location: Larry Saha Room (HA2175)

Abstract: This paper examines the growth, application and impact of technological surveillance in relation to contemporary forms of urban security. It analyses how the city accommodates increasingly intensified surveillance practices that work to coerce, regulate and order elements of urban life. Drawing on data generated from a decade of overlapping empirical research projects analysing surveillance-driven security apparatuses in London and other UK cities the paper examines the practices and arrangements of urban security surveillance. In doing so, the diffusion of surveillance techniques at multiple registers of action are interrogated. At the same time, it traces how the proliferation of responsibilised security actors have drawn multiple diverse practices, organisational approaches and ambitions for control into play, generating numerous paradoxes in the way surveillance operates.

These developments not only provide challenges to the pursuit of security, but also the ways in which it has been theorized. Moving from classic neoliberal or, alternatively, sovereign-focused accounts of the dispatch of security, this paper draws on Foucault’s notions of ‘security’ (2007) and biopolitics (2008), along with the work of his tutor, Georges Canguilhem, to identify how contemporary urban surveillance and security practices are characterised by a series of processes including a move beyond territorial proscription, the assertion of non-Euclidian forms of topological relationality among the panopoly of security actors, and the tolerance of diverse bandwidths of subjectively-defined normality as a precursor for intervention. Moreover, the paper argues that such conceptualisations of security represent a move beyond spatial fixity to the management of circulations, where subjects are left in situ, but their mobilities are monitored, delineated and assessed and, ultimately, seeks to reclaim elements of Foucauldian surveillance-focused debate from the shadow of panoptic analyses.

Speaker Bio: Pete is a criminologist specializing in a number of areas including surveillance and society, terrorism and counter-terrorism, critical studies of resilience, major-event security, organized crime and urban sociology. He has published extensively in these areas, was recently elected a director of the Surveillance Studies Network and, during 2015, was part of a small team of co-investigators awarded an ESRC Large Grant on Human Rights and Information Technology in the Era of Big Data. He has also recently concluded working on two large-scale ESRC and EPSRC funded research projects analysing counter-terrorism in the UK’s crowded spaces and, separately, future urbanism and resilience towards 2050. His other work focuses on organised crime in the EU with particular reference to human trafficking for criminal exploitation (monograph due to be published by Routledge in 2015). Recent books include Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City (Ashgate) and Terrorism and the Olympics (Routledge). In other work, he has also co-authored one of the UK's best selling criminology textbooks (Criminology: A Sociological Introduction) with a team of colleagues from the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex