Surveillance and Nonhuman Life

Newcastle University, 8^th January 2009.

The everyday life of surveillance undoubtedly consists of more-than-human life. Whilst we might be aware of the use of animals (such as sniffer dogs) in monitoring people, we are much less likely to be aware of the biology at work in such practices and the possibilities for their extension. We are almost certainly unaware of the nature and extent of the mundane surveillance of animals, microorganisms and more abstract or hybrid entities, such as diseases, that goes on in the frameworks of our own everyday lives.

Surveillance involving nonhuman life is every bit as governed by the dual logics of care and control as its more familiar counterpart.  But, from the study and monitoring of animal behaviour to determine optimum welfare conditions and ensure their maintenance, to the sentinel birds in quarantine facilities which, like the miner’s canary, will be a first line of warning against impending danger (in this case, avian influenza), these surveillant practices are also tied in to multiple logics of production, consumption and public health.  Increasingly, the wide range of forms of monitoring and intervention of animals are becoming subject to the same discourses of securitisation that govern the use of animals in monitoring humans.  These discourses operate at a range of scales, in a number of different domains of activity, in ways such that the surveillance of nonhuman life is often more concerned with the control of human life.

However, such distinctions may be a red herring as far as understanding surveillance goes. The fundamental differences between humans and other animals are no longer clear cut or biologically meaningful.  Increasingly, the natural sciences are demonstrating that people differ from other animals only by a matter of degree, whilst many in the social sciences have begun to recognise the need to include nonhuman animals within their analyses.  Society is built around nonhuman life as much as human; we are subject to the unruly agency of nonhuman biology just as we strive to control it.

Social explanations and ethical critiques developed within Surveillance Studies have been so preoccupied with the increasingly problematic categorisation of people that they have largely failed to question the centrality of the category of the person to understanding surveillance.  Considering the many forms of surveillance involving nonhuman life serves to problematise the very notion of surveillance.  Practices in this field multiply the range of senses involved and the forms of data collected; they raise the need to better understand the networked and distributed nature of surveillance and its drivers and impacts as well as the distances and complex relationships between forms of monitoring and forms of intervention, forms of care and control.

At the very least, examining the intersections of surveillance and nonhuman life should highlight the need to maintain multiple definitions of surveillance, and perhaps prompt us to strive for a framework that can accommodate different modes of surveillance and their diverse regulatory, legal, socio-economic and ethical conditions.

Speakers:

Gareth Enticott (Research Fellow, School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University)

"Badgers, biosecurity and bovine tuberculosis".

Steve Hinchliffe (Reader in Environmental Geography, Social Sciences, Open University) - title TBC

Amber Marks (Lawyer and investigative journalist, author of Headspace: On the Trail of Sniffer Dogs, Wasp Wardens and Other Dumb Friends in the Surveillance Industry) - title TBC.