Surveillance Archives - Public Seminar

Habitats

Some Notes on the Earth Seen From Space

We have turned the sky into a mirror of our persistence and our forgetting

February 4, 2026 • by Laurie Sheck

1. It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful ...

Interviews

Animated by Not Knowing

A conversation with Wendy Xu on thinking through poetry in Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

October 16, 2025 • by Gabriel Chavez and Wendy Xu

Poet and educator Wendy Xu’s new book, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire (University of Michigan Press, 2025), traverses multiple genres of poetry, poetry criticism, essay, and memoir, presenting close readings and “thinking-throughs” of works by poets such as Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean ...

Social Research

Invisible Images

Can we trust human visual culture in our modern machinic landscape?

February 6, 2023 • by Will Fenstermaker

Today, when the vast majority of the trillions of images produced every second live their entire virtual lives unseen by human eyes, what an image depicts and why matter less than the fact that the image is visible at all....

Artificial Intelligence

AI Spy With My Little Eye: Facial Recognition

Cautioning the increased use of AI in law enforcement

March 23, 2022 • by Patrick K. Lin

The diversity of faces used to train an algorithm can influence the kinds of photos and faces that an algorithm is most adept at examining. If the set of face images is skewed towards a certain race, the algorithm may be better at identifying members of that group as compared ...

AI Spy With My Little Eye: Facial Recognition

Interviews

AI Remains Unchecked: A Conversation With Patrick K. Lin

How technology can mirror biases in our criminal justice system

March 23, 2022 • by Patrick K. Lin and Miko Yoshida

The diversity of faces used to train an algorithm can influence the kinds of photos and faces that an algorithm is most adept at examining. If the set of face images is skewed towards a certain race, the algorithm may be better at identifying members of that group as compared ...

AI Remains Unchecked: A Conversation With Patrick K. Lin

Politics

The Struggle at Turkey’s Boğaziçi University

Attacks on higher education tighten the grip of the AKP’s hegemonic project

April 1, 2021 • by Birgan Gokmenoglu

_____ Late at night on January 1, 2021, by presidential decree, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appointed new rectors to five universities in Turkey. One was Professor Melih Bulu, who became rector of the prestigious Boğaziçi University. This liberal and pluralist institution hosts dissident students and faculty, including many connected to Academics for Peace, ...

The Struggle at Turkey’s Boğaziçi University

Democracy

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Why video surveillance and digital technology intensify racism

October 1, 2020 • by Vince Carducci

————— Over the last three and a half years, the City of Detroit has greatly expanded Project Green Light, an initiative of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), along with local businesses and other organizations, to use video surveillance and digital technology to fight crime. Since the first cameras went live in ...

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Democracy

Should Governments Have Access to Our Data?

Privacy and democracy in the age of pandemics

July 20, 2020 • by Jo Guldi and Macabe Keliher

Americans are scared about encroachments on their data privacy, and rightly so. Prior to 9/11, most advocated limiting the government’s ability to gather and access data in the name of civil liberties. Faced with the threat of terror, however, citizens resigned themselves to encroachments on privacy made in the name ...

Should Governments Have Access to Our Data?

Prisons and Police

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

RoboCop returns

July 9, 2020 • by Micol Seigel

These moves may yield genuine improvements in public life in the United States, something other than the same old tired reforms -- civilian review boards, community policing, recruitment of Black and brown cadets, training and so on -- all of which have proven to be ineffective. But even as the nation ...

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

Uncategorized

Privacy and Surveillance

Who are we in the age of social media and reality television?

May 17, 2018 • by Deandra Irizarry

We currently live in an age of constant surveillance. As users of the Internet, whether or not we consent our information is being shared to companies and businesses for their own benefit. Social media thus has become a form of surveillance in which we share details about our lives and ...

Uncategorized

Revisiting Bartky on Foucault

The production and discipline of femininity

March 21, 2018 • by Alexandra Tadros

In “Femininity and Domination,” Sandra Lee Bartky examines the underlying causes and effects of women’s subjugation in contemporary society. Though women are generally understood to have equal rights, oppression, she argues, does not have to involve “physical deprivation, legal inequality, nor economic exploitation” in order to have a systemic and ...