Canada

Dr. Singh is an Assistant Professor (adjunct) in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University, where he teaches the department's largest course, Introduction to Sociology, to over 800 students. Dr. Singh's main areas of focus are medical sociology, critical race studies and algorithmic inequality. This has allowed him to research topics as varied as credit scoring in South Africa and healthcare in Canada. The common thread in all his work is attention to the racial outcomes of digital sorting technologies. His recent publications on this include: a co-authored article (with Val Steeves) in Social Science and Medicine on the contested meanings of race/ethnicity in medical literature, and an article in The Conversation which highlights concerns with racial surveillance during the current pandemic. He has also published in leading journals such as Security Dialogue, contributed to Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada, and has co-edited a Special Issue in Surveillance & Society.


Dr. Singh is also Co-Editor for the journal Big Data and Society with particular interests in health and medicine, race and surveillance.

Email: sachil.singh@queensu.ca


Twitter: @sachil_singh

Colin Bennett received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Wales, and his Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1986 he has taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, where he is now Professor. He has enjoyed Visiting Professorships at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Center for the Study of Law and Society at University of California, Berkeley, the School of Law, University of New South Wales and at the the Law, Science, Technology and Society Centre at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. His research has focused on the comparative analysis of surveillance technologies and privacy protection policies at the domestic and international levels. In addition to numerous scholarly and newspaper articles, he has published six books, including The Governance of Privacy (MIT Press, 2006) and The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (MIT Press, 2008), and policy reports on privacy protection for Canadian and international agencies. He is co-investigator of a large Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant entitled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting” which has culminated in the report: Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada. He is also currently researching the capture and use of personal data by political parties in Western democracies.

As a co-investigator of the Big Data Surveillance project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Colin Bennett is co-leading (with Kirstie Ball) 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.

Scott Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan, Research Fellow of the Surveillance Studies Centre, and has served as Associate Editor of the journal Surveillance & Society. He is currently a collaborator on ‘The Big Data Surveillance’ project, and the primary investigator on a new SSHRC funded grant investigating the police use of "carding," or "street checks.

Broadly speaking, Norma Möllers’ research interests are located at the intersections of science, technology, and politics: What kinds of values shape science & technology, and how are science & technology implicated in maintaining social order? She is specifically interested in the science and technology of security and surveillance. Further research interests include cybersecurity, digital work/labor (with particular focus on its gendered and global dimensions), and ‘neoliberal’ technoscience.

Currently, she is working on her first book manuscript. Based on an ethnography of the development of a ‘smart’ video surveillance system, it deals with the ways in which science and technology become enrolled in national strategies concerning security, and how this connects to broader shifts in technoscientific knowledge production. She has also started work on her second project which will address the question how governments deal with problems of national territory in cyberspace.

Norma Möllers joined Queen’s Sociology department in Fall 2015. Prior to coming to Queen’s, she worked as a researcher at Humboldt-University’s science studies department in Berlin, as a visiting researcher at UC Irvine, and worked as a researcher at Potsdam University, Germany, which is also where she obtained her PhD. She has studied at Passau University, Germany, and at Sapienza University, Rome.

Laureen Snider is a Professor of Sociology who specializes in the study of Corporate Crime, Surveillance and Regulation, Feminism and Sociologies of Punishment. Her most recent research, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada, examines financial corporate crime, specifically the discontinuities and asymmetries that produce the under-use of surveillance and surveillance technologies in the governance of stock market fraud. The study documents and interrogates the “visibility covers” and “regions of shadow” negotiated by the powerful bankers, lawyers, accountants and stock brokers who dominate global financial markets.

Recent publications include (2010) “Tracking Environmental Crime Through CEPA: Canada’s Environment Cops or Industry’s Best Friend?”, with Suzanne Day and April Girard, in the Canadian Journal of Sociology; (2009) “Regulating Competition in Canada”, with Suzanne Day and Jordan Watters, in the Canadian Journal of Law & Society; and (2009) “Accommodating Power: The ‘Common Sense’ of Regulators” (2008), in Social & Legal Studies. Forthcoming publications assessing the most recent financial crisis, the technological arms race among Wall Street traders and its implications for regulatory agencies, the circular nature of crises, reform and regulatory back-tracking will be (or have just been) published in a number of journals, including Criminology & Public Policy and the Annual Review of Law & Social Sciences, and a number of edited books, titled European Developments in Corporate Criminal Liability (Sage, 2011); How They Got Away With It: White-Collar Crime and the Financial Meltdown (Columbia University Press, Forthcoming); Surveillance Games, (Routledge, 2011); and The Political Economy of Surveillance, (forthcoming 2011 or 2012). The latter 2 articles were both co-authored with Adam Molnar.

David Skillicorn is a Professor in the School of Computing, where he heads the Smart Information Management Laboratory. His research interests are in knowledge discovery in adversarial settings, particularly counterterrorism and law enforcement; he has also worked extensively in parallel and distributed computing. He has authored more than a hundred papers, and several books including the recent "Knowledge Discovery for Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement" (Taylor and Francis). He is the coordinator for Research in Information Security in Kingston (RISK) and is also an adjunct Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada. His Ph.D. is from the University of Manitoba, and his undergraduate degree from the University of Sydney.

Dr. Vincent Mosco is Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, Canada. He is formerly Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society and Professor of Sociology. Dr. Mosco graduated from Georgetown University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 1970 and received the Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 1975.

He is the author of numerous books in communication, technology, and society. His most recent books include The Political Economy of Communication, second edition (Sage, 2009), The Laboring of Communication: Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite (co-authored with Catherine McKercher, Lexington Books, 2008), Knowledge Workers in the Information Society (co-edited with Catherine McKercher, Lexington Books, 2007), and The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2004). The Digital Sublime won the 2005 Olson Award for outstanding book in the field of rhetoric and cultural studies.

Professor Mosco is a member of the editorial boards of academic journals in the North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has held research positions in the U.S. government with the White House Office of Telecommunication Policy, the National Research Council and the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment and in Canada with the Federal Department of Communication. Professor Mosco is a founding member of the Union for Democratic Communication and has also been a longtime research associate of the Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy. In addition, he has served as a consultant to trade unions and worker organizations in Canada and the United States. In 2004 Professor Mosco received the Dallas W. Smythe Award for outstanding achievement in communication research and in 2000 he was awarded one of three teacher of the year awards given by the Carleton University Student Association.

Professor Mosco is currently working on a project funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council that addresses knowledge and communication workers in a global information society. Specifically, it examines how workers around the world are responding to the challenges of technological change, transnational business, and the neo-liberal state. The results are reported in a special expanded issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication which he edited with Professor Catherine McKercher (October, 2006), as well as in Knowledge Workers in the Information Society and in The Laboring of Communication. Having completed a new edition of The Political Economy of Communication, Professor Mosco has begun a project that examines the relationship between the political economy tradition and that of science, technology and society.

Martin Hand is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University. He has degrees in Applied Social Science, Cultural Studies, and a PhD in Sociology from the University of York, UK. Before coming to Queen’s in 2004 he was a research associate in the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition at the University of Manchester, UK.

Martin Hand’s research tries to understand relationships between social theory and ordinary practice focused upon the consumption of technologies of varying kinds across a range of contexts. This has involved collaborative research on sustainable domestic technologies, Internet governance, use and appropriation, and most recently the rise and proliferation of digital photography. His research takes a largely ethnographic approach to studying consumption and use. His recent work has been about the shifting relationships between analogue and digital technologies. He is currently developing a new project which will look at how digitization relates to new mobilities in a range of institutional contexts.

He is currently completing a book called Ubiquitous Photography (forthcoming, Polity Press) stemming from the research on the digitization of photography. His previous book Making Digital Cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity (2008, Ashgate) focused upon how the ‘digital turn’ has been understood in theoretical and discursive terms and how such understandings have in turn shaped the ways in which institutions adopt and manage digitization. His co-authored book The Design of Everyday Life (2007, Berg) stems from collaborative research in the UK on intersections of technology, design and practice across a range of ordinary aspects of everyday life, such as kitchen renovation and DIY. He has also published in a range of journals and collections, including Theory, Culture & Society, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Environment and Planning.

Educated at Oxford and Newcastle, UK, David Murakami Wood is the Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, and former Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies (2009–19). He is an interdisciplinary specialist in surveillance, security and technology in cities from a global perspective, working mainly in Canada, Japan, the UK and Brazil. He is a leading organizer in the field of Surveillance Studies as co-founder and now co-editor-in-chief of the international, open access, peer-reviewed journal, Surveillance & Society, co-founder of the Surveillance Studies Network, co-editor of Surveillance Studies: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2018), Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence (UBC Press, 2021), and the forthcoming International Handbook of Surveillance Studies (Edward Elgar).