SSC Seminar Series: Gavin Smith & Stephanie Nairn

Gavin Smith, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney, Australia; and

Stephanie A Nairn, MA Candidate, Department of Sociology, Queen’s University

Wednesday, February 16th
12:30pm to 1:30pm
Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room D411
** Please note the day change to Wednesday**

“Surveillance as Symbolic Resource: On the Representations of Surveillance in the Culture Industries”

This presentation critically analyses contemporary representations and articulations of surveillance within and across a variety of cultural domains. In particular, the authors are interested in conveying how meanings of state and consumer surveillance are being both constructed and reconstituted in particular ways by an array of entrepreneurial actors and advertising/marketing institutions. Such developments have led surveillance as ‘symbolic resource’ and as ‘imagined entity’ to become more visible in popular consciousness, but in an interesting diversity of hermeneutical forms. In particular, irony has become a key strategy of marketers and culture industry producers, who artfully depict surveillance as a socio-political utility and object routinely embedded within the cultural fabric of everyday life. Theorizing how lay and scholarly understandings of surveillance might be shaped via the consumption of these portrayals and the extent to which contrasting representations instil a widespread cognitive dissonance, forms the major basis of the discussion. Ultimately, the paper upon which the presentation is based is an attempt to identify and comprehend the socially significant nature of cultural depictions and translations of surveillance.

Everyone welcome!

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