Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon & Beyond

Edited by David Lyon Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth century plan for a panopticon prison was picked up by Michel Foucault as the key to understanding modern disciplinary surveillance. But the concept has proved as controversial as it has illuminating. The authors involved in this collection show both how the panopticon may still prove helpful as a metaphor and how surveillance studies can only make progress when, as Haggerty says, the “walls are torn down.” As Zygmunt Bauman notes, “some of the most profound theoretical insights into the impact of surveillance on power relations and the shape of human interaction” are offered here.