Kevin Haggerty is watching what's watching you.
The U of A professor and editor of the Canadian Journal of Sociology specializes in the study of surveillance - a topic high in the public eye after recent revelations that Canada and the U.S. are monitoring citizens through massive domestic surveillance programs.
Haggerty will give a talk Sept. 28 on Surveillance: The Master Patterns as part of the Saturday Scholar Series at Alumni Weekend. The event showcases knowledge from some of the U of A's top teaching and research talent. Visitualberta.ca/alumni/weekend to check out the full slate of speakers.
We sat down with Haggerty for the first of our new Five Questions features.
So, should I be paranoid about surveillance?It isn't just about cameras and spies. Surveillance covers all kinds of different monitoring practices. Some are technological; some are interpersonal. You find it everywhere: workplaces, childrearing, warfare, espionage, policing. None of the stuff that I do or am interested in is really a conspiracy theory - I'm not really a conspiracy guy. I think it's really easy to explain the expansion of surveillance without actually going to dark forces and black helicopters and that sort of stuff. Surveillance serves many purposes and a lot of them are actually quite useful. You don't need to go all spooky to try to explain surveillance.
How did you become interested in surveillance?
My father was a police officer and I can remember conversations with him in our backyard about, hypothetically, what would happen if they could put cameras on the street. It's amazing, because I'm not a remarkably old guy. At the time, that was the most draconian thing you could do. Twenty years later, we don't even blink. It's been completely normalized. Professionally, my PhD was on policing. Part of that, by virtue of what I was seeing, talked about surveillance. I found that I just kept on going back to that subject, whether I was studying the police or the creation of crime statistics.
What are you studying right now?
My colleague Camille Tokar ['10 BA(Crim)] and I recently did a study about how they scan your picture at bars. We interviewed bouncers to see how these things work, what the problems are with it and where this information goes. That was cool, because you don't really get to hang out at clubs and talk to bouncers very often if you're a researcher. Those technologies are often a way to make the bars seem safer or more secure. They help reduce their insurance rates and help convey an image to the public - particularly on Whyte Avenue [in Edmonton], where some of these places are portrayed in the media as being out of control - they present the image that they're trying to control the public. So our conclusion was that [their use] is more symbolic than effective.
What do you want people to take away from your talk at Alumni Weekend?
I hope to make some connections. I think a lot people see surveillance in the news or in their daily lives as snippets or little pieces, but they don't really see the big picture. They don't really see that it's not just one initiative here and there - it's a wholesale transformation of the structure of western societies. Organizations now know more about people than people know about organizations. So that would be one of the knockdown things: to kind of think about the continuities and differential types of power apparent between individuals and organizations.
What excites you about sociology?
The breadth. There are social sciences across campus, and you find sociologists in almost all of those departments. Sociology is - without trying to be colonial - in some ways a master discipline where you can find whatever interests you in an area. To me, that's what's really invigorating.