GER 403

Studies in Comparative Surveillance

SA
Fall 2021
Tues
1:30pm - 4:20pm

Surveillance has long provoked a wide range of social responses, from the embrace of promises of security to a rejection of a threat to civil liberties.  Why can some countries impose such social control while others cannot? Does this dynamic change when the monitoring is instead trans-national, be it in the form of more systemic logics of “surveillance capitalism” or of the new global tracking imperatives provoked by the current pandemic?  This team-taught seminar in comparative surveillance studies will examine the complex cultural, political and techno-historical dimensions of new forms of social control in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Taught in English.    

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