Queen's University

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.

Delano is currently a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law, Queen’s University, under the joint supervision of Professor David Murakami Wood (Department of Sociology) and Professor Lisa Kelly (Faculty of Law). Currently, as an Ontario Trillium Scholarship holder he is exploring the intersectionality of law and surveillance. His research focuses on socio-legal issues related to race, colonialism and the use of facial recognition technologies by law enforcement agencies. 

As a Chevening Scholar, he obtained an LLM at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. In his master’s dissertation, under the supervision of Professor Mike Nellis, he explored the implications of the Snowden revelations, analysing them from the perspective of Bauman’s liquid modernity and investigating the role of online platforms in modern surveillance practices and their relationship with state agencies. 

Prior to attending Law School in Brazil, he trained as an Engineer at the National Institute of Technology, in Japan, as a Monbukagakusho Scholar (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan). 

Delano is a lawyer and clerked with a Court of Appeal in Brazil, and also lived for a year and a half in Russia.

2019- Stéphanie McKnight (Stéfy) is white-settler artist-scholar based in Katarokwi/Kingston Ontario. Her creative practice and research focus in on policy, activism, governance, and surveillance trends in Canada and North America. Within her research, she explores creative research as methodology, and the ways that events and objects produce knowledge and activate their audience. Stéfy’s creative work takes several forms, such as installation, performance, site-specific, online and technological curatorial projects, new media and experimental photography. Recent exhibitions include “…does it make a sound” at Gallery Stratford; “Park Life” at MalloryTown Landing and Thousand Islands for LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017, “Traces” at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, “ORGANIC SURVEILLANCE: Security & Myth in the Rural” at the Centre for Indigenous Research-Creation and “Hawk Eye View” at the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning. She has exhibited solo or group work at Modern Fuel Artist Run-Centre, the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts, the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning, OCAD University, the WKP Kennedy Gallery and White Water Gallery. In 2015, her work Coded, I Am was shortlisted for the Queen’s University Research Photo Contest andQueen’s University 175 Photo Contest. In 2018, her work Hunting for Prey received an honorable mention for the inaugural Surveillance and Society Art FundPrize.

Post SSC- Stéfy McKnight, Assistant Professor (Media Production and Design), School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Canada

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.

I have a PhD in Sociology and MA in Psychology.  My training and research are focused in the areas of Health (particularly the social justice, equity and health and illness) Aging and Gender.  I am also interested in the human-animal bond and well-being. At a personal level, and in my primary research, I believe that we need to take a stand when we see the need for change.  As a result, my research follows my interests and concerns, exploring dynamics of power, inequalities and social justice in understanding the impacts of illness, gender, education, ethnicity and socioeconomic level on various stages of the lifecourse.

As SSHRC Post-doctoral Fellow, Tommy is leading a long-term multidisciplinary collaboration that brings computer scientists and social scientists together to empirically record and critically analyze the lifecycle of location metadata on smartphones.

Supervised by Dr. David Lyon, “A Day in the Life of Metadata” (ADITLOM) involves multiple sub-projects:

The first reverse-engineers of the creation, transformation, and commodification of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) raw measurements.

The second involves the creation of new interactive data visualization software that allows instructors, students, civil society, and privacy advocates to virtually navigate the operating system of an Android smartphone to see how location metadata moves and changes with each algorithm that they interact with.

The third sub-project, called “Big Data Exposed: What Smartphone Metadata Reveals About Users” (BDE) is an experiment that traces how third-party Mobile Location Analytics companies collect smartphone location data to build and subsequently sell traveler and consumer profiles of the residents of Kingston to corporations and governments during the pandemic. Supported by funding awarded by Queen’s University’s Wicked Ideas competition, BDE runs in partnership with the City of Kingston to promote data ethics, privacy, and justice awareness about how their smartphone data is being targeted by companies across the globe for public health, entertainment, and profit purposes. 

With Dr. David Lyon, Tommy co-instructed SOCY 429 Pandemic Surveillance for the Department of Sociology, and is also a Course Designer for the Faculty of Engineer’s Ingenuity Labs. Tommy is also host of the What’s That Noise?! Podcast, which can be heard on Spotify and Apple Music.

Contact: tommy.cooke [at] queensu [dot] ca

Twitter: @whatsthatdata