How does it feel to be under surveillance?
In this post, Jasmin Dall’Agnola reflects on her piece ‘Fieldwork Under Surveillance: A Research Note’, which appeared in the 21(2) issue of Surveillance & Society.
This is a sentiment many of us know only from spy novels and movies. Although much has been written about the state surveillance of scholars during the Cold War, we know little about how democratic and autocratic regimes have made use of the COVID-19 pandemic to intensify the monitoring of researchers. Growing up with my father’s stories about his alleged encounters with KGB agents in China and Albania during his business trips to those countries in the 1980s, I was well aware of the possibility that some agents may follow me around during my fieldtrip to Central Asia in 2022. Yet, little did I know the scale of interest my postdoc research would generate among the various Central Asian operatives in the field. My own experiences with secret agents in Central Asia inspired me to write a research note on this topic for Surveillance & Society.
In My Life as a Spy Katherine Verdery describes two types of surveillance regimes that have different implications for researchers: labor-intensive and technology-intensive. Whereas the former relies mainly on input from people, the latter sidesteps the human element in favor of technology, such as spyware, mics, bugs and cameras.
During my fieldwork in Central Asia, I realized that labor-intensive surveillance dealings are strongly gendered in the region. For many male agents I met, I was a harmless woman who needed male protection because she might be harassed or even abducted. Although my presence was seen as nonthreatening, the fact that I, as an unmarried woman, was working alone in their country raised their suspicion and provoked surveillance in the forms of sexualized threats and harassment.
While Verdery was almost exclusively confronted with labor-intensive monitoring during her fieldwork in Romania in the 1980s, I also experienced technology-intensive surveillance during my research stay in Central Asia in 2022. New high-tech tools do not only allow secret services to easily discover whom a researcher has been in contact with, but the same tools can also be used by them to stalk and surveil researchers long after they have left the field. This can take an emotional toll on the researcher.
I hope that my research note will invite further academic discussion about this issue. We urgently need more textbooks and teaching modules that openly discuss the risks and challenges that might arise when conducting research under the watchful eyes of the authorities.
