Conversation: Surveillance / Environment / Nature / Sustainability

One of the key areas that surveillance studies has been conspicuously little involved in, with only a few exceptions (Donaldson and Wood, 2004; Donaldson 2012; Ottinger 2010; Haggerty and Trottier 2015; Archer 2021), has been the environment and nature. As it becomes increasingly obvious that the effects of the climate crisis are already with us, and with biodiversity loss accelerating, and the environmental justice issues associated with these crises and the potential responses to them worryingly unaddressed, it seems clear that surveillance studies should have more to say. In this free-form, wide-ranging discussion, Simone Browne, Francisco Klauser, and David Murakami Wood, three leading surveillance studies scholars who’ve all been involved in the field and the journal for most, if not all, of its history, discuss the different ways in which their research is dealing with questions of environment, nature, and sustainability and how surveillance studies more broadly could engage. Each starts by introducing their current research direction, before the conversation opens up.