Assistant Professor

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.

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.

Scott Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan, Research Fellow of the Surveillance Studies Centre, and has served as Associate Editor of the journal Surveillance & Society. He is currently a collaborator on ‘The Big Data Surveillance’ project, and the primary investigator on a new SSHRC funded grant investigating the police use of "carding," or "street checks.

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.