Queen's University

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

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.

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).

In Memoriam: Arthur Cockfield, HBA (University of Western Ontario), LL.B (Queen’s University), JSM and JSD (Stanford University). Art was an Associate Professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law where he was appointed as a Queen’s National Scholar. Prior to joining Queen’s, he worked as a lawyer in Toronto and as a law professor in San Diego. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Texas and a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Professor Cockfield authored, co-authored or edited nine books and over forty academic articles and book chapters that focus on tax law as well as law and technology theory and privacy law. He was the recipient of a number of fellowships and external research grants for this research, including four grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, an American Tax Policy Institute grant, the Charles D. Gonthier research fellowship for privacy law research, and two publication grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. His writings have been translated into over twenty languages (mainly through his work as an author and editor for UNESCO) and have been published in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia.

Professor Cockfield passed away suddenly on 9 January 2022.