 |
|
||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
Return to the Current Issue Index
Craig Willse - “Universal Data Elements,” or the Biopolitical Life of Homeless Populations
This article explores the development of the Homeless Management Information Systems program by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Launched in 2001, the program mandates data collection by homeless social service agencies receiving federal funds. The program is examined in terms of broader responses to the “electronic turn” in social work. The generative capacities of database management systems are understood as producing surveillance at a register other than the individual subject often presumed in political theories of social control as well as surveillance studies of information technologies. The article argues that we must move toward an understanding of homeless management as a biopolitical enterprise, rather than only a disciplinary one. A discussion of how the HMIS program produces a homeless population as an object of knowledge and plane of intervention provides an understanding of the significance of HMIS for homelessness in the U.S. as well as for surveillance studies more broadly.
Aging in place, the option to grow old in one’s home instead of institutional healthcare facilities, is predicated on the development of technologies and resources that network patients, caregivers, medical personnel, and third party interlocutors. Monitoring systems and other information technologies are broadly considered to be the most promising means to establish these connections, and home care technologies for elderly people with dementia comprise one of the fastest growing areas of commercial development. Grounded in the political economy of aging and understood as surveillance, monitoring technologies for the elderly highlight sociopolitical responses to aging and dementia and raise critical questions about caregiving, quality of life, and the way technological design engages with everyday rights. This paper will analyze surveillance technologies for the elderly with attention to issues of power and inequality, and how these dynamics may or may not be considered in technological design for the oldest populations
In Brazil, over the last few decades, projects for the installation of surveillance cameras for security purposes in spaces of public circulation have multiplied. However, the issue has not been specifically studied in the country. Research on surveillance cameras in Brazil has generally focused on cities and security. The debate on urban gentrification or private security has usually included the issue of CCTVs as a built-in element. The analysis presented here, based on data coming from research work carried out between 2002 and 2005, focuses on the installation of surveillance cameras in a public park in the central region of the city of São Paulo (Brazil). A multiplicity of discursive elements circulating in the country is analyzed, following an approach influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Based on this case study, it is possible to notice that cameras actually take part in a process of gentrification and are also related to new knowledge about security and its privatization. Cameras are also analyzed here as a part of the mechanisms of the functioning of power, and their contemporary changes.
Public space is an essential component of the daily life of homeless people, whether rough sleepers or hostel dwellers or others who are inadequately housed. During 2006 a group of researchers from the European Observatory on Homelessness considered the ways in which the increasing surveillance, regulation and control over public space, evident in all European cities, has impacted on the lives of homeless people. In this paper we chart the background to this latest phase in the ‘regulation of urban space’ and assemble evidence from across Europe and especially from our case study countries – Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. We attempt an analysis of these trends using concepts of ‘border control’, ‘discipline’ and ‘deterrence’. We also consider a limited number of examples of resistance by and on behalf of homeless people to the imposition of restrictions on public space access. In the concluding section, we reflect on related wider societal processes associated with urban regulation and surveillance and their impact on the use of public space.
Robert Pallitro and Josiah Heyman - Theorizing Cross-Border Mobility: Surveillance, Security and Identity This article explores the effects of post-9/11 security programs on mobility into and within the United States. Specific programs such as retinal scanning and vehicle preclearance are analyzed according to the differential effects they generate in terms of risk, rights and speed of movement. These differentiations suggest that individuals and groups will be identified in unequal ways, and that they will in turn experience their mobility differently. In the end, the analysis provided here adds complexity to current theorizations about citizenship and identity: it shows that while individuals make claims to new and different kinds of citizenship, state power also makes claims on individuals that do not always depend on citizenship. In view of the manifest inequalities resulting from the mobility control practices currently in use, rethinking of those practices is warranted, and an emphasis on shared burdens would be more productive. Sarah Wiebe - Opinion. Re-Thinking Citizenship: (Un)Healthy Bodies and the Canadian Border
The Canadian state screens potential citizens based on their physical and mental health in order to assess individuals’ likelihood of becoming contributive and productive members of Canadian society. Immigrants are not only screened as potential security risks in a traditional sense, but appear in Canadian discourse as threats to economic stability. These potential citizens are consequently screened and surveilled for health concerns. This essay examines these screening practices from a critical political science approach using Foucault's theory of biopolitics to evaluate the correlation between biopolitics – the governance of life – and immigration by focusing on Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) Canada's policy and legislative discourse. This essay argues that Canadian modern political subjectivity is predicated on the notion that citizens must be healthy in order to be truly political and to have political voice and agency. Finally, the essay calls for a re-conceptualization of the category of "citizen" in the modern Canadian state.
