Gavin J.D. Smith

‘Health’ surveillance: new modes of monitoring bodies, populations, and polities

The papers in this special section of Critical Public Health engage with the broad topic of health surveillance. Originally presented together as a panel at the Surveillance and/ in Everyday Life conference – an international event held in 2012 at the University of Sydney, Australia – the articles explore diverse efforts to track and to exploit healthrelated phenomena. As they illustrate, health-related surveillance is not a straightforwardly unproblematic undertaking. It might serve progressive objectives and the forces of positive social change, empowering individuals and populations to take better care of their health. It may also – in spite of being undertaken in the name of health – be bound up with processes that discriminate, marginalize and ultimately militate against social justice. Such diverse uses and outcomes require us to focus greater critical attention on ‘health’ surveillance, on its means and sometimes divergent ends. In spite of efforts to clearly circumscribe the meaning of surveillance in (public) health contexts (e.g. Sherman and Campione-Piccardo 2007), definitional pursuits are vexed by the multiple possible uses of health-related data (Reynolds and Crichton 2007). The working definition we have in mind here captures any tracking or monitoring, whether systematic or not, of health-related information. To help specify the kinds of activities that might fall under this broad definition, we provide, below, a few snapshots of health surveillance in action. We then briefly review literature useful to the critical analysis of health surveillance before describing how the articles in this special section pave the way for future research. This scene-setting exercise highlights some of the central dynamics that characterize the health-related surveillance of bodies, populations and polities.

Surveillance, Data and Embodiment On the Work of Being Watched

Today’s bodies are akin to ‘walking sensor platforms’. Bodies either host, or are the subjects of, an array of sensing devices that act to convert bodily movements, actions and dynamics into circulative data. This article proposes the notions of ‘disembodied exhaust’ and ‘embodied exhaustion’ to conceptualise processes of bodily sensorisation and datafication. As the material body interfaces with networked sensor technologies and sensing infrastructures, it emits disembodied exhaust: gaseous flows of personal information that establish a representational data-proxy. It is this networked actant that progressively structures how embodied subjects experience their daily lives. The significance of this symbiont medium in determining the outcome of interplays between networked individuals and audiences necessitates that it is carefully contrived. The article explores the nature and function of the data-proxy, and its impact on social relations. Drawing on examples that depict individuals engaging with their data-proxies, the article suggests that managing a virtual presence is analogous to a work relation, demanding diligence and investment. But it also shows how the data-proxy operates as a mode of affect that challenges conventional distinctions made between organic and inorganic bodies, agency and actancy, mortality and immortality, presence and absence.

Health by numbers? Exploring the practice and experience of datafied health

ABSTRACT The widespread availability of portable sensing devices has given rise to growing numbers of people voluntarily self-tracking their daily experiences through the medium of digital data. At the extreme end of this trend is the ‘Quantified Self’ movement. This collective uses sensor-enabled tech to extensively map aspects of their personal lives, before sharing procedural insights at community ‘show and tell’ events. A key aim of the group is to better understand imperceptible bodily processes, especially those influencing health states, as they are materialised through the datafied body. Despite the growth in those mobilising digital data for health management, little is known about the subjective meanings that are ascribed to self-monitoring practices. This paper explores how self-trackers conceptualise the data they generate, and how exteriorised bodily interiorities mediate impressions of embodiment. We suggest that the availability of self-tracked data has initiated interesting new relationships between data-subjects and their objectified bodies, dynamics that impact on how bodies are experienced and inhabited. We show how bodily intuition is being outsourced to, if not displaced by, the medium of ‘unbodied’ data. It is this objectivated facility that is increasingly used to orientate behavioural decisions as they relate to bodily maintenance.

Theorizing Surveillance in Crime Control

Surveillance is conventionally perceived as a key component of the crime control apparatus. This editors’ introduction to a Special Issue of Theoretical Criminology on ‘Theorizing Surveillance in Crime Control’ outlines both the need for new theorizing on surveillance and some of the difficulties in doing so. It also introduces the seven pieces in the Special Issue.

Opening the Black Box: The Work of Watching

Part I: Problematizing and Contextualizing Watching Practices 1. Towards Supervisory Circulations: Circuitry coordinates 2. Engaging Circuitries: Researching supervisory circulations Part II: Engaging the Means of Watching 3. Instigating Circuitries: Inception and reception 4. Construing Circuitries: Supervisory projection 5. Bearing Circuitries: Supervisory subjection 6. Sustaining Circuitries: Supervisory aberration

Surveillance and Embodiment Dispositifs of Capture

This article provides an introduction to a special issue of Body & Society that explores the surveillance--embodiment nexus. It accentuates both the prevalence and consequence of bodies being increasingly converted into ‘objects of information’ by surveillance technologies and systems. We begin by regarding the normalcy of body monitoring in contemporary life, illustrating how a plurality of biometric scanners operate to intermediate the physical surfaces and subjective depths of bodies in accordance with various concerns. We focus on everyday experiences of bodily intermediation by surveillant dispositifs, and consider the broader political, epistemological, and ontological significance of these processes. We then point to the substantive intersections and divergences existing between body and surveillance studies. We conclude with an overview of the five articles appearing in this special issue. We describe how each contribution creates a template for imagining what a body is, and what a body might become, in a culture defined by proliferating data sharing behaviours, systems of codification, and practices of intermediation.

Data doxa: The affective consequences of data practices:

This paper explores the embedding of data producing technologies in peoples everyday lives and practices. It traces how repeated encounters with digital data operate to naturalise these entities, while often blindsiding their agentive properties and the ways they get implicated in processes of exploitation and governance. I propose and develop the notion of ‘data doxa’ to conceptualise the way in which digital data – and the devices and platforms that stage data – have come to be perceived in Western societies as normal, necessary and enabling. The ‘data doxa’ concept also accentuates the enculturation of many individuals into a data sharing habitus which frames digital technologies in simplistic terms as (a) panaceas for the problems associated with contemporary life, (b) figures of progress and convenience, and (c) mediums of knowledge, pleasure and identity. I suggest that three types of data-based relations contribute to the formation of this doxic sensibility: fetishisation, habit and enchantment. Each of these relations come to mediate public understandings of digital devices and the data they generate, obscuring the multifaceted nature and hidden depths of data and their propensity to double up as technologies of exposure and discipline. As a result of this situation, imaginative educational programs and revamped regulatory frameworks are urgently needed to inform individuals about the contribution of data to the leveraging of value and power in todays digital economies, but also to protect them from experiencing data-based harms.