security

Torin Monahan is a Professor of Communication at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on institutional transformations with new technologies, with a particular emphasis on surveillance and security programs. He has published over forty articles or book chapters and five books, including Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity, which won the Surveillance Studies Book Prize of the Surveillance Studies Network in 2011. Areas of expertise include ethnography, science and technology studies, surveillance studies, critical criminology, urban studies, and contemporary social and cultural theory. Monahan is a director of the international Surveillance Studies Network and an associate editor of the leading academic journal on surveillance, Surveillance & Society.

Kirstie Ball is Professor of Management at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on surveillance, security and privacy, particularly as these issues affect organizations. Her current empirical work focuses on the impact of national security on the private sector, particularly on front line workers; the public understanding of security, surveillance and privacy; surveillance and democracy; and privacy and the quantified self. Her theoretical interest concerns subjectivity and surveillance. Kirstie has been collaborating with Queen’s University since 2001. She was featured as a research collaborator in ‘The Globalization of Personal Data’ and as  Co-Investigator in ‘The New Transparency’. Kirstie has held grants from many of the major European social science funders, including the European Union Framework Programme, EPSRC, ESRC and The Leverhulme Trust.  Her published work almost exclusively appears in journals such as New Technology, Work and Employment, Labour History, Tourism Management, Work, Employment and Society and Organization. She has recently published the monograph ‘The Private Security State? Surveillance, Consumer Data and the War on Terror’ with Copenhagen Business School Press.  She has also edited ‘The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies’, with Kevin Haggerty and David Lyon, and ‘The Surveillance-Industrial Complex’ with Laureen Snider. Kirstie was a founding editor of Surveillance and Society and a founding director of Surveillance Studies Network.

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

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).