Kirstie Ball

Kirstie Ball is Professor of Management at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on surveillance, security and privacy, particularly as these issues affect organizations. Her current empirical work focuses on the impact of national security on the private sector, particularly on front line workers; the public understanding of security, surveillance and privacy; surveillance and democracy; and privacy and the quantified self. Her theoretical interest concerns subjectivity and surveillance. Kirstie has been collaborating with Queen’s University since 2001. She was featured as a research collaborator in ‘The Globalization of Personal Data’ and as  Co-Investigator in ‘The New Transparency’. Kirstie has held grants from many of the major European social science funders, including the European Union Framework Programme, EPSRC, ESRC and The Leverhulme Trust.  Her published work almost exclusively appears in journals such as New Technology, Work and Employment, Labour History, Tourism Management, Work, Employment and Society and Organization. She has recently published the monograph ‘The Private Security State? Surveillance, Consumer Data and the War on Terror’ with Copenhagen Business School Press.  She has also edited ‘The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies’, with Kevin Haggerty and David Lyon, and ‘The Surveillance-Industrial Complex’ with Laureen Snider. Kirstie was a founding editor of Surveillance and Society and a founding director of Surveillance Studies Network.

As a co-investigator of the Big Data Surveillance project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Kirstie Ball is co-leading (with Colin Bennett) research Stream Two: Marketing. This stream will examine how massive data accumulation, analytical techniques and applications associated with big data are reconstructing practices of consumer marketing and political campaigning.