Queen’s University

The Surveillance Studies Centre is delighted to announce that from July 1, Alana Saulnier (re)joins the SSC, as an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department. She will work alongside Dr. David Murakami Wood.

Alana Saulnier completed her PhD in sociology from Queen's University in 2016, and both David Lyon and David Murakami Wood are pleased to welcome her back to Queen’s as a faculty member in the Department of Sociology.

Saulnier comes to Queen’s from Lakehead University, where she coordinated the Criminology Program as Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, and before that, from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Saulnier’s Queen’s appointment follows a comprehensive international search process last year. For her doctoral work at the Surveillance Studies Centre, Saulnier focused on the lived reality of surveillance, particularly how people negotiate, resist and defy surveillance practices. Her work has most recently focused on police use of body-worn cameras. She is also active in the Surveillance Studies Network and is an Associate Editor with the journal Surveillance & Society.

Sharry Aiken is an assistant professor in the faculty of law at Queen's University. She is the editor in chief of Refuge, Canada's Periodical on Refugees and is a past president of the Canadian Council for Refugees. In 2006 she represented a coalition of public interest groups, including the Canadian Council for Refugees and the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, in an intervention before the Supreme Court of Canada in the cases of Charkaoui, Harkat and Almrei. Relevant publications include “Manufacturing ‘Terrorists’: Refugees, National Security and Canadian Law” (2000); “Of Gods and Monsters: National Security and Canadian Refugee Policy”, (2001); “Risking Rights: An Assessment of Canadian Border Security Policies” (2007); “From Slavery to Expulsion: Racism, Canadian Immigration Law and the Unfulfilled Promise of Modern Constitutionalism” (2007); and “National Security and Canadian Immigration: Deconstructing the Discourse of Trade-Offs” (forthcoming 2008). In 2007 she was awarded a SSHRC standard research grant for her project, Refugee Diasporas,“Homeland” Conflicts and the Impact of the Post-9/11 Security Paradigm.

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.

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.

David Lyon is the Principal Investigator of the Big Data Surveillance Project (2015-2021). He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Socioiogy and Law at Queen's University and is the former director of the Surveillance Studies Centre. Educated at the University of Bradford in the UK, Lyon has been studying surveillance since the mid-1980s. Credited with spearheading the field of “Surveillance Studies”, he has produced a steady stream of books and articles that began with The Electronic Eye (1994) and continued with Surveillance Society (2001), Surveillance after September 11 (2003), Surveillance Studies (2007), Identifying Citizens (2009), Liquid Surveillance (with Zygmunt Bauman, 2013) and Surveillance after Snowden (2015). His most recent publication is The Culture of Surveillance (Polity, 2018) and he is currently working on Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford). He has also co-edited a number of other books, mostly the products of team projects on surveillance, with research funding totalling almost $8 million. He is on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Surveillance & Society and The Information Society. Most recently awarded the Outstanding Contribution Award by the Surveillance Studies Network (2018) and the SSHRC Impact: Insight Award (2015), Lyon has also received numerous awards for his work, from Canada, Switzerland, the USA and the UK.

As Principal Investigator of the Big Data Surveillance project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, David Lyon is co-leading (with Stéphane Leman-Langlois and David Murakami Wood) research Stream One: Security. This stream examines the scope and impact of big data-dependent ‘national security’ surveillance of communications in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations. They are working on an edited publication called Security Intelligence and Surveillance in the Big Data Age: The Canadian Case (UBC Press, forthcoming).