Ben Brucato
From 2016 to 2018, and again in 2022 to current, I am a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at UMass Amherst. I am a former Assistant Professor of Criminological Theory in the Department of Sociology at Framingham State and a former Assistant Professor of Justice Studies in the Department of Sociology at Rhode Island College. I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center For Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.
Supervisors: Langdon Winner
Supervisors: Langdon Winner
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OccupyWall Street is a microcommunity that embodies a vision for a pluralistic, direct democratic society and demonstrates it through practice. This uprising provides a potential democratic solution for a way beyond crisis to new horizons.
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In beginning to understand the mechanisms by which accountability policies generate new forms of surveillance, I turn to an ethnographic case study of a new electronic attendance-monitoring program at Northern Arizona University (NAU). At NAU, administrators in enrollment management created, adopted and funded a program to monitor attendance institution-wide using RFID card readers, centralized databases and standardized reports. What we see in this case is that the process of translation is active, dynamic, and dependent upon dispositive frames that are shared across boundaries between policy-makers and university administrators.
In this chapter, I will first discuss what I call dispositive frames. Beginning with Foucault’s dispositif, I link the focus on problem-identification among discursive institutionalism, technological frames, and organizational frames. Next, I provide a review of research and commentary on new accountability, primarily referencing works from education policy analysts. Here, I consider what we might expect from other research on accountability policies and how those were translated into surveillance practices. Research on the link between accountability policies in K-12 schools and surveillance provides some direction. Finally, I turn to the NAU case study to provide an empirically-grounded theoretical explanation that elucidates the role dispositive frames play in translating accountability policy into surveillance practices.
OccupyWall Street is a microcommunity that embodies a vision for a pluralistic, direct democratic society and demonstrates it through practice. This uprising provides a potential democratic solution for a way beyond crisis to new horizons.
"
In beginning to understand the mechanisms by which accountability policies generate new forms of surveillance, I turn to an ethnographic case study of a new electronic attendance-monitoring program at Northern Arizona University (NAU). At NAU, administrators in enrollment management created, adopted and funded a program to monitor attendance institution-wide using RFID card readers, centralized databases and standardized reports. What we see in this case is that the process of translation is active, dynamic, and dependent upon dispositive frames that are shared across boundaries between policy-makers and university administrators.
In this chapter, I will first discuss what I call dispositive frames. Beginning with Foucault’s dispositif, I link the focus on problem-identification among discursive institutionalism, technological frames, and organizational frames. Next, I provide a review of research and commentary on new accountability, primarily referencing works from education policy analysts. Here, I consider what we might expect from other research on accountability policies and how those were translated into surveillance practices. Research on the link between accountability policies in K-12 schools and surveillance provides some direction. Finally, I turn to the NAU case study to provide an empirically-grounded theoretical explanation that elucidates the role dispositive frames play in translating accountability policy into surveillance practices.
Taser AXON Flex offers multiple wearable camera options, such as camera-integrated eyeglasses, and links with other devices like stun-gun mounted cameras in the web-based EVIDENCE.COM video database. Taser’s communications about the AXON Flex system stress the importance of mobility in surveillance technologies and point-of-view in the media they produce. AXON Flex allows the cameras to move with officers, as opposed to commonplace dashboard cameras. EVIDENCE.COM allow in-the-field assessment of video footage on smart phones, tablets, and laptops. Crucially, the focus on point-of-view coincides with the juridical principle of reasonableness, which privileges officers’ points of view in use-of-force investigations.
The emphasis on point-of-view is also a reaction to the explosive growth in civilian video documentation of policing, most commonly produced with video- and data-enabled smart phones. I compare how mechanical objectivity functions as a means similarly in the discourse of advocates for civilian sousveillance of police, but using different rationales.
In considering the conflicts over visual representations of police and policing, I explain the implications of this conflict for surveillance studies. I question whether we can legitimately assume visual surveillance is efficacious and powerful as a result of its objectivity. Seeing might be believing; but it matters who is seeing what, and from whose perspective.
Historically, policing has occurred outside of public view (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993), perhaps more opaque than any other aspect of governance. The transformation of everyday technologies – amateur digital cameras, smart phones – into surveillance devices has uncovered these once hidden activities (Yesil, 2011). Among advocates for victims of police brutality and in favor of “police accountability,” incidental video recording of use of force renders the body in pain visible, enabling justice whereby offending officers may be held culpable.
Using discourse analysis of theoretical and political texts, and ethnographic and interview data, I characterize and analyze transparency as advanced among these advocates. Using Byung-Chul Han’s (2012) concept of Transparenzgesellschaft, I connect the theme of transparency to related considerations of objectivity (Schwartz, 2009; Galison, 1999; Sekula, 1978) in order to provide a rationale for the ambiguous outcomes of visual surveillance.
There are myriad methods by which power makes the body visible, to make it an object of perception, attention, description, knowledge, classification, record (Bruno, 2011; Crary, 1992; Sekula, 1986). Powerful institutions and privileged actors therein have access to technologies, techniques, and institutions that enable control over the body made visible for purposes of direction, protection, and administration (Lyon, 2001).
The focus on transparency as productive of power has encouraged a rhizomatic view of surveillance, one opposed to “hierarchies of observation” (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000). Transparency presumes that the technologies and techniques of rendering the body visible to surveillance are neutral, since visibility itself has a certain positive value (Han, 2012). When used by civilians, surveillance technologies that amplify the power of governments and police are presumed to allow civilians to objectively capture bodies in pain and the violence of those officials who inflict it. Yet, the surprising frequency with which new amateur videos documenting incidence of police violence are circulated suggests that this recent development of transparency has not provided significant protection for civilians from police power.
My research suggests that while visibility may somewhat reliably function to produce legitimacy for the powerful in wielding their authority in holding civilians to account, it is inappropriate to presume this is an inherent outcome of the production of visibility. When those without institutional power make the performances of power transparent, outcomes are ambiguous. Thus, transparency as inherently productive of popular power is in doubt.
The implications of this investigation reach far. In a time of Wikileaks, the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, and other endeavors by civilians to render visible the actions of the powerful, transparency is presumed to have an inherent potential to produce power. Activists across the United States and around the world advocate for civilians to blow whistles, to document wrong-doing, and to circulate these documentations. It is crucial that the underlying presumptions that motivate this advocacy be investigated both analytically and empirically.
Synthesizing theoretical insights gained from the social construction of technology (SCOT) approach in technology studies and disruptive technologies in innovation studies, our analysis of 7 years of qualitative research reveals challenges and opportunities for the future of SSL. A key social, research and marketing success in SSL has been the ability to redefine problems and how to solve them with SSL applications.
A frontier for considerable expansion of SSL product types and broader diffusion of these will be in intervening in the infrastructures that have thus far narrowly constrained application environments. Replacement lamps have reached acceptable quality and are rapidly approaching acceptable price points. Yet these applications do not fully exploit the capabilities of SSL. Lighting system development that allows for less costly and more socially acceptable SSL applications in existing residential, business, and civic buildings will open up large markets and promote deeper penetration of SSL products.
In the first consideration, I explain how these discourses reproduce the legitimacy of securitization. Securitization relies on manufacturing ubiquitous risk and normalizing the strategically management of this risk through threat identification, surveillance, and preemptive violence. In the second, I explain the militarized capacities of contemporary police as a consequence of deep historical connections between institutions of higher education, on the one hand, and military officer training and weaponry research and development on the other.
These two considerations allow advocates for justice, peace, and democracy to represent a third pole in debates about school shootings. First, this third pole would challenge the legitimacy of securitization, and instead work to undermine the systemic injustices that undergird this trend. Second, “guns on campus” controversies open up opportunities to demilitarize the university, subverting the longstanding relationship between higher education and the military-industrial complex.
We're all Copwatchers now, and we have considerable access to distribution channels and viewers for the media we produce. Since police activity is increasingly militant and depends more than ever on a wider array of weaponry, various publics are exposed to their violent applications. But the proliferation of these media alone is evidence of the limits of these documentations in challenging police power. What explains this? This talk will consider some key case studies and suggest some answers to this important question for how we might act respond to police violence and the visibility thereof.