Everyday Resistance

Summary

In the study of surveillance, science, technology, and society (STS) offers close attention to the roles and possibilities of everyday people—particularly as they relate to resistance. With the understanding that seeing and being seen, knowing and being known, are not monolithic experiences or processes, STS scholarship moves past binary frames of resistance such as visibility versus invisibility. The field advances, instead, rich accounts of how cultural norms, historical contexts, and social relations produce challenges to the mechanisms of data capture and the logics of hierarchy and control within surveillance systems. As a field, STS has developed empirical and theoretical research to expand our understandings of surveillance and resistance in everyday life. Among a wide array of practices, three overarching, though not mutually exclusive, categories of everyday resistance emerge as particularly salient: exclusion, sousveillance, and negotiation. While building on and drawing from other fields, STS leverages both the technical and the social to understand practices like interference, evasion, contestation, and looking back as tactics of everyday resistance that disrupt surveillance and empower individuals.