Racializing Surveillance

Summary

Racializing surveillance is an interdisciplinary framework that analyzes how surveillance practices reinforce the social construction of “race.” Surveillance becomes racializing when individuals are classified, profiled, or rendered suspect according to socially constructed categories of racial difference, often with discriminatory outcomes. Developed by scholar Simone Browne, this framework addresses a longstanding under-theorization of the role of racism and racialization in the study of surveillance by centering “race” as a critical analytic. Racializing surveillance foregrounds the constitutive significance of race making and its historical formation in the development of modern surveillance practices. Drawing upon literature in fields across racism and racialization studies, science and technology studies, border studies, surveillance studies, and other disciplinary vectors, scholars engaged with this framework examine how surveillance manifests as a racializing practice that shapes social, political, and spatial relations within a given time and place. Ranging from archival to empirical to ethnographic approaches, studies of racializing surveillance contend with and challenge prevailing assumptions of neutrality and objectivity undergirding the widespread proliferation of surveillance technologies in the 21st century.

Literature on racializing surveillance not only examines the data-driven, algorithmic operations of surveillance systems deployed in contexts such as border control, policing, military operations, and financial institutions but also excavates longer historical entanglements between surveillance and racialism. Tracing techniques of governance, identification, and classification integral to the history of modern conceptions of “race,” these accounts situate 21st-century surveillance technologies within the long durée of colonization, transatlantic slavery, and other systems of racialized domination. Accounts of racializing surveillance also attend to histories and contemporary strategies, activist and creative, that undermine or redirect the gaze of surveillance apparatuses. By situating racializing surveillance within broader historical and contemporary socio-technical contexts, this resource aims to deepen our understanding of surveillance as a racializing practice and to explore the implications for the use and development of surveillance technologies in the 21st century.