Benjamin Goold - Böcker

PIN numbers, credit records, photo IDs and biometric measures play a central role in our daily lives. Instead of being mere by-products of public and private surveillance systems, such tokens of trust are now fundamental to surviving in modern society – so much so that our ‘surveillance profiles’ have begun to inform the way in which we think about notions of community and personal identity. In this fascinating volume, Benjamin Goold considers how surveillance is experienced by individuals within both the criminal justice system and the wider community and argues that the convergence of different spheres of surveillance – law enforcement, state security and commercial – has led to a fundamental shift in the way in which individuals are recognized and legitimized in society. Using examples drawn from the US, UK, Canada, Japan and Australia, this book presents a new account of how surveillance is changing the ways in which people respond to crime, their relationship to the state and each other.

Over the past fifty years, the apparatus of surveillance in modern societies has expanded to such an extent that almost every aspect of our public and private lives is now open to scrutiny and analysis. Each time we walk down a city street or pass through a shopping centre, CCTV cameras record our every move. Credit card and online purchases are logged and used to construct ever more detailed profiles of our consumption patterns and preferences. Personal information held by a bewildering array of state and private organizations is becoming increasingly centralized and searchable. As a result, modern life and citizenship is now intimately bound up with surveillance and the construction of data profiles, profiles that are largely beyond our power to alter or amend, and which may bear little resemblance to how we see ourselves (or want to be seen). Combining fear of crime and a desire for social control, surveillance is an inescapable fact of modern life.Research on surveillance—conducted by governments, academics, and the private sector—has exploded in recent years and this new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in Criminology, addresses the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary scholarly literature. Edited by Benjamin Goold of Oxford University’s Centre for Criminology and organized into three principal parts, Surveillance is a four-volume collection of the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship.Surveillance is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. An essential reference collection, it is destined to be valued by scholars and students of criminology—as well as those working in the allied fields of sociology, politics, and urban studies—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.