Everybody's Got a Little Light under the Sun

' Black Luminosity and the Visual Culture of Surveillance
Simone Browne

In this talk, Simone Browne, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin,  explores the historical presence of surveillance technologies of the transatlantic slavery - slave patrols, fugitive notices, and lantern laws - to question how technologies of seeing instituted through slavery to track blackness as property inform the contemporary surveillance of the racial body. This is done through an examination of the reality television program Mantracker and The Book of Negroes, the first large-scale public record of black presence in North America.
Her current research interests include airport protocol and pedagogies of travel; biometric technologies; and examining how identity fraud and web-based "scams" are framed in popular culture as a means to understand some of the ways in which public perceptions of risk are formed.
Her book project, Skin?: Surveillance, Technology and Race, questions how the historical remains of early surveillance technologies form part of the enabling conditions of certain new technologies, including biometrics. Professor Browne is currently working on a co-edited collection with Dr. Shoshana Magnet titled Feminist Surveillance Studies.