Mission
The mission of the Surveillance Studies Research Center (SSRC) is to facilitate scholarship and collaborative partnerships in the study of contemporary forms of surveillance, social monitoring, and data gathering. Surveillance Studies is a burgeoning, global, interdisciplinary field that is producing new and important theoretical and empirical understandings of human behavior. The only Center of its kind in the United States, the SSRC seeks to address one of society’s grand challenges for the 21st century.
News
New NSF Grant
SSRC Director Bill Staples and SSRC Faculty Affiliates Perry Alexander and Drew Davidson have been awarded a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Social and Economic Sciences and Secure & Trustworthy Cyberspace. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project will augment their larger project that addresses challenges faced by those who rely on public libraries for their computing needs and broadband Internet access. The novel coronavirus and COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption to life and brought new challenges to the lives of these individuals. The months-long shuttering of libraries has, in essence, evicted these users from their only space for broadband. These people cannot simply work from home or e-learn new skills, nor can their children shift to distance learning. As states begin the process of ending stay-at-home orders and libraries reopen, the PIs are collecting qualitative and quantitative retrospective information about what transpired during the quarantine and what is transpiring as states reopen.
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SSRC Director Bill Staples has published a chapter entitled, “Real-Time Grade Books and the Quantified Student,” in the volume, Metric Culture: Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices (2018) edited by Btihaj Ajana, Kings College, London.
A documentary film, "Surveillance Culture" co-directed by Drs. Btihaj Ajana and Anders Albrechtslund features SSRC Director Bill Staples. The film was produced during Bill’s appointment as Visiting Professor at Aarhus University, DK in the summer on 2018.
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