The Haunting of Surveillance Studies: Seeing, Knowing, and Ghostly Apparitions

This paper explores the relevance of a ghost methodology for surveillance studies. Following Torin Monahan’s (2021) call to unsettle transparency as a metric or goal of surveillance studies and inspired by Michelle Brown’s (2022) demand that criminology exorcise the ghosts of white supremacy, I draw upon a 2020 case of a police-involved death of a racialized woman in Toronto to consider the haunting absence of images that are usually called upon to offer evidence what “really” happened. Against the desire to make this death empirically knowable, a ghost method asks us to live with the “eerie” remnants of violence as palpable presences that require of us a reckoning. The spectral presence of white supremacy that looms over the ghostly absence of Regis Korchinski-Paquet can lead us to a form of redress consistent with abolitionist ways of seeing. Thus, I seek to break the impasse of debates over the costs or benefits of increased transparency by outlining how a ghost methodology can help to decentre surveillance studies’ preoccupation with visibility in favour of a more nuanced appreciation of haunting and absence.