Appreciating Surveillance Cultures

This paper is a reflection on the importance of the electronic eye and the subsequent work in surveillance studies as a discipline growing from that book. It offers a mapping of one scholars encouter with surveillance studies, from exploring the implications of surveillance cultures embedded in the phsyical fabric of urban space to engaging with the surveillance imaginaries being constructed and experienced via emergent forms of citizenship, enmeshed in a distrustful world.

The work of David Lyon is of vital importance to this story, helping contextualise these encounters - for the author, for the discipline, and for surveillance as a subject, object and feild of enquiry. How this work has helped shaped this emergent discipline for the author (personally), but also for sociology as a whole is addressed; suggesting that the feild of surveillance studies has contributed to a kind of 'open ended pragmatism' in social sciences. By asking important questions at macro, meso and micro levels this has opened up a more nuanced understanding of surveillance in all its forms - though this paper emphasises surveillance culture and surveillance imaginaries. The contribution seeks to better illustrate how important this approach is to the development, experience and research output of a generation of scholars, and seeks to explore and discuss how the study of surveillance advances sociology as a whole.