Surveillance is a central organizing practice. Gathering personal data and processing them in searchable databases drives administrative efficiency but also raises questions about security, governance, civil liberties and privacy. Surveillance is both globalized in cooperative schemes, such as sharing biometric data, and localized in the daily minutiae of social life. This innovative Handbook explores the empirical, theoretical and ethical issues around surveillance and its use in daily life.
With a collection of over forty essays from the leading names in surveillance studies, the Handbook takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question issues of:
- surveillance and population control
- policing, intelligence and war
- production and consumption
- new media
- security
- identification
- regulation and resistance.
The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies is an international, accessible, definitive and comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing multi-disciplinary field of surveillance studies. The Handbook's direct, authoritative style will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities.
Surveillance has a high profile in security contexts - it is also increasingly central to organizational life: personal information is valued commercially as well as in policing. Through international comparisons and up-to-date, expert analysis this handbook shows how and why surveillance operates today, touching everyday life with unprecedented consequences - both good and bad.
"This ground-breaking book contains over forty essays by some of the leading commentators on the burgeoning academic field of Surveillance Studies, covering most if not all of the critical challenges of surveillance and population control; policing, intelligence and war; the new social networking media; the emerging capacities of geo-location, identity recognition and real time tracking, as well as the thorny questions of future regulation and resistance, over a generous volume of some 437 pages.Whilst there are other excellent Surveillance Studies readers, such as the work edited by Hier and Greenberg (2007), the formidable profile, diversity, breadth and scope of the Routledge collection, make it quite simply, definitive. Here we have authors such as James Rule, Gary Marx, David Lyon and Clive Norris-who essentially founded the field-mixed with new authors who take the insights of these pathfinders into new domains. The Handbook could not be more timely, as the pace of technological innovation in surveillance transcends many of the existing legal and cultural limits and understandings of its role and function." Steve Wright, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
