This panel discussion invites speakers to share important chapters in US surveillance history: analog surveillance in the early colonial era, FBI surveillance of Black and Muslim communities in the 1970s through 1990s, and NYPD and federal surveillance of Muslim communities after 9/11. The speakers will then weave the chapters together, showing the historical, tactical, and social connections between agencies, approaches, and philosophies and how surveillance undergirds the need for control and fear of the other in US society from its earliest days.
Featuring Simone Browne, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (author, Dark MattersI On the Surveillance of Blackness); Assia Boundaoui, filmmaker and investigative journalist (director/producer, The Feeling of Being Watched); and Aliya Hana Hussain, Advocacy Program Manager, Center for Constitutional Rights; moderated by Lilly Irani, Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego.
“The Normalizing Gaze: Surveillance from Drones to Phones" is an online speaker series organized by High Line Art and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in conjunction with artist Sam Durant's High LIne Plinth commission "Untitled (drone)”.