Digital Surveillance In Post-Pandemic World: Technological Transformation, Cultural Norms, and Everyday Practice

The COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2023) stands as one of the defining turbulences of our era — a crisis that not only reshaped public health governance but dramatically accelerated the deployment of digital surveillance infrastructures across the globe. During the pandemic, governments in different countries swiftly institutionalized contact tracing applications, biometric verification systems, mobility tracking platforms, or social media monitoring under the logic of emergency. Although most emergency practices ended by 2023, these technological infrastructures and the collected data have persisted or expanded, and some are increasingly embedded in the routines, norms, and cultural fabric of daily life, such as online meeting and QR code. This session invites scholars to examine the post-pandemic surveillance landscape from a globally comparative perspective. We are interested in identifying how pandemic surveillance was introduced or intensified in the local context and transformed or settled into the post-pandemic life. As Asia was called the “surveillance hotspot” during the pandemic, this session takes place in an ideal location to collectively explore how differently digital control is implemented, experienced, and reproduced through the diversity of state-society relationship, institutional habits, cultural logics, historical formations, and infrastructural inequality. We welcome papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions: How have the surveillance infrastructures and collected personal data during the pandemic been used for other purposes afterwords? How have pandemic surveillance technologies been absorbed into post-pandemic everyday practice? What cultural logics and social norms render post-pandemic surveillance ordinary, necessary, or acceptable? Where does resistance emerge?