Revitalizing Dissent: Imperatives for Critical Surveillance Inquiry

In this introduction to Surveillance & Society’s twentieth anniversary issue, we reflect on the journal’s role in the formation and maturation of the field and on some of the many areas in need of further study and intervention. In keeping with one of the journal’s original objectives of “encouraging debate and dissent,” we argue that it is imperative that the field reaffirm this dissenting posture. Such dissent would be primarily critical and decolonial, and it would concentrate its energies on correcting social and environmental problems. Some of the areas in need of more intensive critical inquiry are 1) surveillance / platform / data capitalism, 2) war and conflict, 3) disinformation and media manipulation, 4) racial injustice and carcerality, 5) intersectional violence and oppression, and 6) environmental crises and climate collapse. Fortunately, as many of the recent publications in the journal affirm, scholars are already moving in these directions, and we, as editors, are doing everything we can to support such critical work and the academics producing it.