Department of Sociology

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.

Life after Retiring in 2005

To keep one’s mind active while getting old, I am told, is a good recipe for fending off Alzheimer's and keeping visits to the doctor’s office at bay. What I did not pay enough attention to is the second prescription, namely to keep the body active as well. I compiled a list of publications to show what I have done since retiring in 2005.

2019 - Winter     Visiting researcher in the Arab Research Center, Doha Qatar
 
2014-2016    Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

2012-2014; 2016    Guest Editor of Omran, a refereed social science journal that is published in Arabic by the Arab Research Center in Doha, Qatar (the theme of these issues is surveillance and privacy in the Arab World)

Refereed books:

Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit, Routledge, London 2016

Coedited with David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power, Routledge, London, 2011.

Coedited with David Lyon, Emily Smith, Lynda Stalker, and Yolnade Chan Surveillance, The Globalization of Personal Data: International Comparisons, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008

Coedited with Mark Salter, Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security and Identity, Willan Publishing, London, 2005.

Journal publications

“Qatar’s Humanitarian Aid to Palestine,” Third World Quarterly, Fall 2017, Pp. 1-17.

“Strategies of Surveillance: The Israeli Gaze,” Jerusalem Quarterly, No. 66, 2016, Pp. 12-38.

Pending journal publications

"Methodological Issues in the Development of Social Science in the Arab World", to be published in Omran, an Arabic social science journal, January 2020.

"Donald Trump’s Punitive Politics and the Palestine Question: A Gaze into his Psychological Makeup and Business Ethics", to be published in The Journal of Holy LAND and Palestine Studies, Fall 2019.

Work in progress

"Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism and Cyber Surveillance: The Case of Israel", in submission.
Netanyahu’s Only Democracy in the Middle East, in preparation.

Thomas Linder is a doctoral candidate and a Big Data Surveillance research fellow at the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University, supervised by Dr. David Murakami Wood. Thomas has submitted his PhD on Canadian Police Real-Time Operations Centres, and will be examined very soon. Keenly interested in political theory, he completed his BA and MA at the University of Zurich. His MA thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Philipp Sarasin investigated the complexity of defining surveillance in the digital era.

His doctoral research is on emerging surveillance technologies and their impact on domestic security practices. Beyond political theory and international relations, he works in Science and Technologies Studies with a particular focus on digital technologies and is a co-editor at ‘Transmissions: An SSS Companion Blog.’

In addition, he is a research fellow in the Big Data Surveillance SSHRC project where he works on Big Data-driven national security surveillance practices as well as on the development of intelligence-led and predictive policing programs in Canada.

Contact:

Twitter: @pan_optician

PGP: 16TAL@queensu.ca — Key ID: BDB7D17F; Fingerprint: E448 381E 5DA7 CD7E 9B9B 7B79 6AAB 8279 BDB7 D17F

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