Surveillance, race, and social sorting in the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has made headlines for its use of mass surveillance technologies against UAE residents, as well as opponents externally. Under the guise of protecting national security, there has been a proliferation of state-led initiatives to monitor public spaces and online activity across the UAE, making the country an important laboratory for advanced surveillance tools. This article takes as a starting point that despite claims to being race-neutral and scientific, surveillance technologies have an embedded racial bias and operate according to context to (re)produce forms of state control and racial social relations. Reviewing the introduction of multiple surveillance technologies, this article traces the rationales used to racially order space and define deviance in the UAE context, emphasising questions of race, migration status and labour, to understand how the state defines, codifies, and regulates an ethno-racial hierarchy.

Recommended Life

This chapter addresses how profiling and social sorting shape consumption and entertainment through recommendations and nudges. It looks at a conversation between a man and his grandchild while they were deciding what to watch. The grandchild mentioned a movie which Netflix says is a 96-per cent match to his tastes. He explains that Netflix tracks what he watches and whether he likes something, then suggests other programmes it thinks he might like. The man then talks about the importance of pushing one's boundaries and getting exposed to new stories, ideas, and genres to learn stuff and cultivate new tastes. When the conversation turned to the news, the grandchild mentions Facebook, which he claims is another thing that only shows him what it wants him to see. He also talks about targeted ads and algorithms.

“No shit Sherlock”! Canine DNA and policing public space

PurposeThis paper argues that this animal surveillance has the potential for considerable function creep going far outside the scheme's original objectives and acts as a conduit for more problematic surveillance of humans. This results in social sorting of people with subsequent unforeseen consequences leading to discrimination and curtailment of freedoms for both animals and their owners. Ultimately this opens people up to further intrusive targeting by commercial interests and, more alarmingly, scrutiny from law enforcement agencies.Design/methodology/approachAn empirical study examining an initiative involving the collection of canine DNA sources data from publicly available Cabinet, Select Committee and Scrutiny Committee records from the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD). It also draws on news media sources, publicity material from the company running the scheme and from this and other local authorities. Methods include analysis of documents, semiotic and discourse analysis.FindingsThis paper highlights the importance of animals to surveillance studies and examines the extent to which animals are a part of the surveillant assemblage in their own right. It also demonstrates how nonhuman animals extend the reach of the surveillant assemblage.Social implicationsThe scheme was called a badge of considerate dog ownership, yet it is one that can be franchised to tie up with diverse income streams being described as advantageous in the age of austerity. In 2017, it was reported that this scheme was to be rolled out in other areas and was moving from being voluntary to being mandatory with the enforcement of Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs). These have been described as “geographically defined ASBOS” that have come into force under the Anti-social Behaviour and Policing Act (2014); they often work to criminalise activities that were not previously considered illegal.Originality/valueIn the theorising of surveillance, animals have been largely overlooked. Epidemiological studies proliferate, yet the role of animals in many aspects of everyday surveillance has been neglected.

Millennial America and the World to Come

This chapter addresses another pair of seeming opposites — New Age spirituality and Christian evangelicalism — in order to reveal their shared embrace of the spiritual possibilities on offer in the free market. The chapter considers the rising belief in the end times alongside the emergence of “channeling,” the period's other popular mystical movement, in which earthbound mediums become conduits for otherworldly spirits. Adherents of rapture and channeling profess a stronger reverence for self-authorization and reason than the precepts of their faith might lead us to imagine. Then, too, they predicate that respect on the kinds of social sorting we are used to seeing in various seventies enterprises. As with other movements, rapture and channeling reveal the friction between freedom and equality in millennial America.

Political Mission of University: A Retrospective View

Academic3 space in its different manifestations has been taking an honorable position in social structure from the earliest stages of the history of human civilization by systematizing multitude experiences of both external and internal world of humankind. At the same time, educational landscape was formulating the different ways of how to theorize about and interact with the world. Simultaneously, there was always combating with the alternative systems and, what is more, this struggle wasn’t necessarily intellectual or polemical. Little has changed in how society perceives academy and its functions in the era of accomplished digital revolution, including its role as an instrument of surveillance and social sorting – these two important elements of power. In this article, an attempt is taken to comprehend University – and speaking broadly academic space as such – as a special kind of social and political field used to perform surveillance and social control. On the example of colonial colleges in the USA, this article examines how University may serve as a surveillance mechanism on the one hand and as a mean of cultural transformation on the other hand, and what conclusions can be made regarding the present and the future of University in the digital era.

The Evolution and Implications of Perceptions of Barack Obama's Ideological Positioning

I examine perceptions of Barack Obama's ideological positioning from 2006 to 2016. White Americans perceived Barack Obama to be significantly more liberal than respondents from other racial groups, and whites scoring higher on measures of racial resentment saw Obama as more liberal than those scoring lower. Perceptions of Barack Obama's ideological positioning shifted leftward early in his presidency but shifted rightward after 2010. This rightward shift notwithstanding, Obama was perceived to be quite liberal from the start of his presidency, and perceptions of his ideological positioning were racialized from the beginning. There is some evidence that citizens' perceptions of Barack Obama's ideological positioning became more racialized between 2012 and 2014. Placements of Hillary Clinton were racialized in 2016, suggesting that the Obama presidency may have lasting effects on the ideological stereotyping of Democratic candidates. I discuss these findings in light of recent research on social sorting, affective polarization, and negative partisanship.

Surveillance in Practice: Operators’ Collective Interpretation of CCTV Images

CCTV surveillance is a cultural practice and collective effort. CCTV not only involves a technical assemblage that is used to discipline the surveilled, it is also a social assemblage in which the informal practices of operators play a major role in the multiple interpretations of images. This paper provides insights into the daily work practices and discourses of CCTV operators and their supervisors through observations of and interviews in the control room of public CCTV surveillance in Rotterdam. By providing a better understanding of the role of people in socio-technical assemblages, this paper contributes to the discussion on human mediation in computerized networks. The paper contributes to the expanding literature on surveillance as a cultural practice by combining insights on social sorting with insights on collective evaluation of unfolding situations—i.e., how group dynamics within the control room influence how people are “judged.” Building on Goffman’s frame analysis, the paper reveals the crucial role of talk and humor in re-performing what happens on the streets as well as evaluating situations and the people watched. Moreover, it discusses how these collective re-performances of what is being watched both reproduce and reshape “othering” practices within the control room. The paper shows how humorous utterances play an important part in overcoming hierarchy and collectively managing emotions, and explores how this humor influences profiling on the basis of bodily appearance.

Capitalization and its Legal Friends

Katharina Pistor’s argument in The Code of Capital about the constitutive role of legal practice for the creation and distribution of wealth requires contextualization; her claims about the stand-alone role of law in determining the political economy of global capitalism are exaggerated. My first intervention concerns the concept of capital. Capital evidently is not just a legal code, but also constitutes a financial accounting entity that emerges from processes of investment, which are embedded in (economic, social, political) structures that are facilitative of unequal distributions of rewards and risks. Legal coding should be considered as part of such ‘capitalization’ and as becoming more critical in the contemporary economy, in which capitalization increasingly happens through financial engineering and through capturing rents from ‘intangible capital’. Secondly, we can only understand the distributional implications of legal coding if we recognize a) the importance of rent-seeking in secularly stagnating economies and b) the particular class configurations in what Milanovic, B. (2019). Capitalism, alone. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press calls ‘liberal meritocratic capitalism’. The consolidation of a capital-rich and hard-working upper class in such a capitalist formation (the extreme case being United States) not just indicates a close alliance or overlap between holders of wealth and the professions (fund managers, legal advisers etc.) that serve them. It also indicates that social class structures – the paths of socialization they reproduce; their in-built social sorting mechanisms; their close association with ideologies of legitimate privilege – play a key role in reproducing economic distributional outcomes.