Canada

The Surveillance Studies Centre is delighted to announce that from July 1, Alana Saulnier (re)joins the SSC, as an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department. She will work alongside Dr. David Murakami Wood.

Alana Saulnier completed her PhD in sociology from Queen's University in 2016, and both David Lyon and David Murakami Wood are pleased to welcome her back to Queen’s as a faculty member in the Department of Sociology.

Saulnier comes to Queen’s from Lakehead University, where she coordinated the Criminology Program as Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, and before that, from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Saulnier’s Queen’s appointment follows a comprehensive international search process last year. For her doctoral work at the Surveillance Studies Centre, Saulnier focused on the lived reality of surveillance, particularly how people negotiate, resist and defy surveillance practices. Her work has most recently focused on police use of body-worn cameras. She is also active in the Surveillance Studies Network and is an Associate Editor with the journal Surveillance & Society.

Bibi is an MA student in Sociology at Queen’s University researching theoretical and methodological approaches to swarm drones in the Media, Information and Surveillance stream. In 2020 she graduated from an MA in Political Studies with a thesis on biometrics in Iraq and Afghanistan also from Queen’s. Bibi works as the project coordinator of the Gender Lab at the Centre for International and Defence policy, managing and researching on multiple grants on the topic of women and gender perspectives in the military.

David is a first-year MA student in Sociology at Queen’s University under the supervision of Professor David Murakami Wood. His main research interests are radical right-wing populism and artificial intelligence. Consequent to beginning his MA studies David was awarded the Arthur B. McDonald Prize for Academic Excellence by Queen’s University. In 2020 he graduated from the Sociology department at St. Francis Xavier University. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Canadian Sociological Associations ‘Outstanding Graduate’ award for his BA thesis on text generating AI’s and their potential applications for disinformation campaigns. His work on test generating AIs has been presented at international conferences and is currently being published in a collected work.

Currently, David is conducting research on adtech and the intersection between surveillance capitalism and AI infrastructure. He recently published a co-authored article in The Conversation Canada with David Murakami Wood on evolving Google adtech technology and is working on follow-up publications on the future of Google's AI research, and its scope beyond advertising.

Supervised by: David Murakami Wood (Department of Sociology, Queen's University) and Angus McBlane (Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India)

Rohit is a third year PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Program at Queen’s. He is writing on the acculturation of paranoia in late stage capitalism - treating it as an emergent crisis of interpretation that relates in particular ways to the contemporary material conditions of economic/ecological crisis and technological hyper-connectivity. This work hopes to simultaneously combine literatures on the risk and network societies, and examine paranoia as a psychosocial ramification of this combination - departing from the traditionally pathologising lens used by clinical disciplines as well as disciplines such as cultural/social epidemiology.

His research interests are largely centred around philosophy of technology and cultural theory. He is also interested in projections of apocalypse in the history of Science Fiction.