DATE CHANGE SP Seminar Series - Eric Stoddart

Eric Stoddart
School of Divinity
St Mary's College
University of St Andrews
Scotland

Academic visitor to The Surveillance Project, Sept - Nov 2009.

Caring Surveillance

What happens when we make caring relationships the principal mode for evaluating surveillance practices? This presentation will sketch out the terrain of a critical ethic of care when it is applied to a range of surveillance practices. Drawing, initially, on the work of Joan Tronto, Virginia Held and Fiona Robinson a critical ethic of care will be utilized that goes beyond dyadic and domestic relations to a fully public appropriation.

Reconfiguring autonomy as relational and re-prioritizing the particular over the universal will open up new avenues for exploring surveillance as a necessary dimension of care and by which deleterious outcomes may also be exposed.

Pointers will be offered towards Christian theological contributions to this use of a critical ethic of care. Mary Grey, Beverly Wildung Harrison and Lisa Isherwood, amongst others, resource a critique that explores relationality and embodiment. Jurgen Moltmann will offer scope for excavating the eschatologies of surveillance: those views of the future within which contemporary surveillance practices, such as pre-emptive sorting, are embedded.

Everyone welcome!