Description
The central questions of this paper are: How do we understand how police and protesters are using surveillance technologies? Specifically, how do these actors navigate the controversies over race within surveillant assemblages? The following pages lay the theoretical groundwork for best exploring these questions. First, a critical analysis of the Foucauldian term dispositif opens up space to build upon surveillant assemblage theory regarding police-protestor contexts. I put forth three suggested developments that augment the concept in scope and depth, allowing us to intervene in and move beyond the Foucauldian short-comings. The first development will engage with Critical Race and Post-colonial authors whose work has intervened in Foucauldian Security Studies, ultimately applying their analyses to and outlining racialized dispositifs in police-protestor contexts. In the next development, the paper will outline the idea of ‘machine agency’ in these contexts, denoting the underexamined effects that the mechanisms of (counter-)surveillance (e.g. body-cams, camera-phones, drones) have on police-protestor interactions. The final development will explore notions of relationality along these aforementioned elements, in order to better understand the tensions that arise from antagonistic clashes between the two groups in visual veillant assemblages. The paper concludes with a contextualization of these theoretical interventions in relation to two pertinent case studies: Black Lives Matter and Stand with Standing Rock. With these three interventions and case-studies, the paper will produce a theoretical platform to investigate contemporary veillant assemblages around police and protester relations.
