Department of Sociology

Özge is a PhD candidate at Queen's University in the Department of Sociology, under the supervision of David Lyon. Her dissertation analyses the surveillance experiences of young adults in Turkey; focusing on how they understand, experience, assess and engage with commercial surveillance through their smartphones, mobile apps and social media. She conducted one-to-one in-depth and focus group interviews with young adults in Turkey to understand their experiences. She is in the process of writing her dissertation.

She has also worked, recently, on articles (in press and under review) that discuss social impacts of the pandemic through an autoethnographic approach as part of the Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking During COVID-19 Times project.

Having an interdisciplinary background, Özge was awarded a master's degree in International Communications from the University of Leeds in the UK as a British Chevening scholar, she completed a master's in Business Administration in Italy with a Simest (Società Italiana per le imprese all'estero) scholarship in Università per Stranieri di Perugia and she received her BA in Communication Studies from Bilkent University in Turkey. Following her master's degrees, she worked for about ten years in different positions in the field of trade, sales, and marketing in multinational and small-medium size companies in Turkey. After she came to Queen's, she worked as the Surveillance Studies Centre seminar series organizer for three years.

2019- Steven Richardson obtained his PhD in Sociology from Queen's University in June 2019. Focusing on wearable technologies, his doctoral research explored how things like tinkering, problem solving, hype, communities and communications shape what wearables are and are for. With a blend of STS (Science and Technology Studies), phenomenology and reflexive ethnography, this research uncovered a broader and more inclusive approach to understanding innovation, what he terms ‘the duality of design’. The term also implicates the role of the researcher in this relation, renewing the call for more reflexivity in accounts of socio-technical ordering.

In short: when we study emerging technologies, we’re not just studying innovation communities, we are a part of that same community; we may be critical of some new technology or its surveillance implications, but that critique does not stand above, apart, or aside from that same reality. To move sociology forward, we have to move away from seeing ourselves (scholars, researchers) as merely ‘participant observers’ but rather as ‘observant participants’ – in the midst of things like everyone else. Not only does this change in perspective offer important opportunities for reconceptualizing our relationship with the technologies we use, design and study, it helps bring us closer to the technologies and innovations that (will) continue to get closer to us. Bringing something close is a condition for a renewed beginning. Following this, our quest(ioning) concerning technology can continue with a greater appreciation of the role social science can play in bringing on not just hopeful, but desirable futures.

2019- Joe Masoodi is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Political Science (Brock) and Masters in War Studies (Royal Military College of Canada). He is currently interested in the relations between international/domestic security, surveillance studies, and information communication technologies. When Joe isn’t reading, he enjoys hiking, coffee and star gazing...though not in that particular order.

Post SSC- Debra Mackinnon is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary. She received her PhD in Sociology from Queen’s University in 2019. Her doctoral dissertation, “Mundane Surveillance: Tracking mobile applications and urban accounting in Canadian Business Improvement Areas” explored how technologies are used to police, account for, render, and manage urban space and populations. Broadly, her research interests include surveillance studies, urban studies, criminology, smart urban environments and IoT technologies, and qualitative methods. Her current work focuses on questions of digital (in)justice, inclusion and governance in smart city partnerships.

2020- Rui Hou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University. His current research interests are in political sociology, sociology of emotions, contentious politics, and surveillance studies. Hou's doctoral project explores how for-profit organizations are engaged in dissent management in contemporary China. By qualitative methods, his research addresses the question by exploring the Chinese state-market collaboration in two sites where public dissent is channeled and neutralized: the Mayor's Hotline system (市長熱線) and the Internet-opinion industry (輿情產業).

Post SSC- Rui Hou, Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, Canada.

2018- With a BA (Honours) from Queen’s University, and an MA from the University of Toronto, Michael Carter is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s focused on ’smart cities’. He is supervised by Dr. David Murakami Wood. For his thesis he is researching the benefits, risks and governance models associated with the collection, analysis and sharing of personal mobility data in the context of public transit systems. He is interested in the futures of multi-modality, payment processing, trip planning and mobility as a service, and their convergences. Michael is currently conducting a case study on the Presto smart card system in the City of Toronto. This work is in conjunction with research on the Google spin-offs Coord and Sidewalk Labs, particularly their activity in the City of Toronto.

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.

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.