The Transparent Traveler

At the airport we line up, remove our shoes, empty our pockets, and hold still for three seconds in the body scanner. Deemed safe, we put ourselves back together and are free to buy the beverage we were prohibited from taking through security. In The Transparent Traveler Rachel Hall explains how the familiar routines of airport security choreograph passenger behavior to create submissive and docile travelers. The cultural performance of contemporary security practices mobilizes what Hall calls the "aesthetics of transparency." To appear transparent, a passenger must perform innocence and display a willingness to open their body to routine inspection and analysis. Those who cannot—whether because of race, immigration and citizenship status, disability, age, or religion—are deemed opaque, presumed to be a threat, and subject to search and detention. Analyzing everything from airport architecture, photography, and computer-generated imagery to full-body scanners and TSA behavior detection techniques, Hall theorizes the transparent traveler as the embodiment of a cultural ideal of submission to surveillance.

Through an array of detailed case studies, this book explores the vibrant digital expressions of diverse groups of Muslim cybernauts: religious clerics and Sufis, feminists and fashionistas, artists and activists, hajj pilgrims and social media influencers. These stories span a vast cultural and geographic landscape-from Indonesia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East to North America. These granular case studies contextualize cyber Islam within broader social trends: racism and Islamophobia, gender dynamics, celebrity culture, identity politics, and the shifting terrain of contemporary religious piety and practice. The book's authors examine an expansive range of digital multimedia technologies as primary “texts.” These include websites, podcasts, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channels, online magazines and discussion forums, and religious apps. The contributors also draw on a range of methodological and theoretical models from multiple academic disciplines, including communication and media studies, anthropology, history, global studies, religious studies, and Islamic studies.

Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, provide greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, sociohistorical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific sociopolitical contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust—rather than trust—can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the interrelationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders.

From 9/11 to the Snowden leaks, stories about surveillance increasingly dominate the headlines. But surveillance is not only 'done to us' – it is something we do in everyday life. We submit to surveillance, believing we have nothing to hide. Or we try to protect our privacy or negotiate the terms under which others have access to our data. At the same time, we participate in surveillance in order to supervise children, monitor other road users, and safeguard our property. Social media allow us to keep tabs on others, as well as on ourselves. This is the culture of surveillance. This important book explores the imaginaries and practices of everyday surveillance. Its main focus is not high-tech, organized surveillance operations but our varied, mundane experiences of surveillance that range from the casual and careless to the focused and intentional. It insists that it is time to stop using Orwellian metaphors and find ones suited to twenty-first-century surveillance — from 'The Circle' or 'Black Mirror.' Surveillance culture, David Lyon argues, is not detached from the surveillance state, society and economy. It is informed by them. He reveals how the culture of surveillance may help to domesticate and naturalize surveillance of unwelcome kinds, and considers which kinds of surveillance might be fostered for the common good and human flourishing.

Questions of gender, race, class, and sexuality have largely been left unexamined in surveillance studies. The contributors to this field-defining collection take up these questions, and in so doing provide new directions for analyzing surveillance. They use feminist theory to expose the ways in which surveillance practices and technologies are tied to systemic forms of discrimination that serve to normalize whiteness, able-bodiedness, capitalism, and heterosexuality. The essays discuss the implications of, among others, patriarchal surveillance in colonial North America, surveillance aimed at curbing the trafficking of women and sex work, women presented as having agency in the creation of the images that display their bodies via social media, full-body airport scanners, and mainstream news media discussion of honor killings in Canada and the concomitant surveillance of Muslim bodies. Rather than rehashing arguments as to whether or not surveillance keeps the state safe, the contributors investigate what constitutes surveillance, who is scrutinized, why, and at what cost. The work fills a gap in feminist scholarship and shows that gender, race, class, and sexuality should be central to any study of surveillance. Contributors. Seantel Anaïs, Mark Andrejevic, Paisley Currah, Sayantani DasGupta, Shamita Das Dasgupta, Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Rachel Hall, Lisa Jean Moore, Yasmin Jiwani, Ummni Khan, Shoshana Amielle Magnet, Kelli Moore, Lisa Nakamura, Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Smith, Kevin Walby, Megan M. Wood, Laura Hyun Yi Kang

Examines how the US-Mexico border is seen through visual codes of surveillance When Donald Trump promised to “build a wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border, both supporters and opponents visualized a snaking barrier of concrete cleaving through nearly two thousand miles of arid desert. Though only 4 percent of the US population lives in proximity to the border, imagining what the wall would look like came easily to most Americans, in part because of how images of the border are reproduced and circulated for national audiences. Border Optics considers the US-Mexico border as one of the most visualized and imagined spaces in the US. As a place of continual crisis, permanent visibility, and territorial defense, the border is rendered as a layered visual space of policing—one that is seen from watchtowers, camera-mounted vehicles, helicopters, surveillance balloons, radar systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, and live streaming websites. It is also a space that is visualized across various forms and genres of media, from maps to geographical surveys, military strategic plans, illustrations, photographs, postcards, novels, film, and television, which combine fascination with the region with the visual codes of surveillance and survey. Border Optics elaborates on the expanded vision of the border as a consequence of the interface of militarism, technology, and media. Camilla Fojas describes how the perception of the viewing public is controlled through a booming security-industrial complex made up of entertainment media, local and federal police, prisons and detention centers, the aerospace industry, and all manner of security technology industries. The first study to examine visual codes of surveillance within an analysis of the history and culture of the border region, Border Optics is an innovative and groundbreaking examination of security cultures, race, gender, and colonialism.

How those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included--and who is excluded--in the future. Our world is built on an array of standards we are compelled to share. In Proxies, Dylan Mulvin examines how we arrive at those standards, asking, "To whom and to what do we delegate the power to stand in for the world?" Mulvin shows how those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included--and who is excluded--in the future. For designers of technology, some bits of the world end up standing in for other bits, standards with which they build and calibrate. These "proxies" carry specific values, even as they disappear from view. Mulvin explores the ways technologies, standards, and infrastructures inescapably reflect the cultural milieus of their bureaucratic homes. Drawing on archival research, he investigates some of the basic building-blocks of our shared infrastructures. He tells the history of technology through the labor and communal practices of, among others, the people who clean kilograms to make the metric system run, the women who pose as test images, and the actors who embody disease and disability for medical students. Each case maps the ways standards and infrastructure rely on prototypical ideas of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and purity to control and contain the messiness of reality. Standards and infrastructures, Mulvin argues, shape and distort the possibilities of representation, the meaning of difference, and the levers of change and social justice.