SSC PhD Student

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

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

Signal: Ask for number.

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- Spencer Revoy is a cultural and media theorist who is currently a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. He received a BA with Honours in Cultural Studies and an MA in Theory, Culture and Politics, both from Trent University. His MA thesis examined the structure of Facebook’s surveillance program through a re-evaluation of Foucault’s Panopticon, Deleuzian schizoanalysis, and Zygmunt Bauman’s philosophy of liquid modernity. He continues this line of research by examining sites and spaces of surveillance through a highly interdisciplinary lens, with an emphasis on understanding the cultural effects of ubiquitous online surveillance.

Currently, his research interests include: critically evaluating the design of mobile interfaces, especially the paradigm of “user-friendliness”; the application of Deleuzian philosophy to questions of surveillance on the Internet, especially the question of the Internet’s ontology; and the politics of friendship as influenced by social media. He is particularly interested in how processes of “becoming friends” and “being friends” are affected by social media’s pervasive conditions of surveillance and commodification.

2020- Alex Mitchell is a PhD student in Marketing at the Queen's School of Business, under the supervision of Dr. Jay Handelman. Alex's interests and research focus on the impact of consumption and marketing practices to relationships between consumers, marketers, institutions, and society. In particular, Alex is interested in the cultural implications of contemporary marketing practices with respect to the collection and analysis of consumer data, as well as consumer surveillance of marketers and other consumers facilitated by mobile technologies and social media.

In the past Alex has explored marketing strategy in enterprises seeking to balance social and commercial interests (social enterprises), as well as how the rhetoric and practices embedded in marketing strategies serve to mask underlying firm-privileging power dynamics. Alex received a Bachelor's degree in History and Psychology from Carleton University, and a Master's degree in Management from the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa.

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.