Introduction: Decolonizing Surveillance Studies

Surveillance & Society has published periodic, focused “debates” on surveillance-related topics since 2011. With the re-named “Dialogue” section, we expand our prior focus on the debate format to include other forms of curated, short-form discussions among scholars on issues of importance to the surveillance studies community. In this Dialogue, a selected group of participants present their ideas for “decolonizing surveillance studies.” The idea for this focus on decolonization within surveillance studies scholarship was sparked by the growing recognition in a number of academic fields that certain viewpoints and perspectives have long been prioritized over others, often to the exclusion of important histories, theories, and experiences offered by those whose research or perspectives have not been well represented in the larger body of academic scholarship. The seven pieces published in this Dialogue section seek to examine the broader decolonizing project and propose an agenda for decolonizing surveillance studies as a field of study.