Interview with Simone Browne
Dr. Simone Browne, a Presidential Visiting Fellow for the 2018–2019 academic year, has provided me with deep insight into the field of surveillance studies and the urgency of its subject matters in today’s political climate. This semester, Dr. Browne is teaching the course “Race, Gender and Surveillance,” through which I’ve had the opportunity to access such material. A Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies, much of Dr. Browne’s work is informed by the intersections between African American studies and surveillance studies. Her most recent work, a book titled Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, investigates the convergence and divergence of these subject areas. Her upcoming work will involve the curation of an exhibit about Black women artists at the University of Texas at Austin.
NS: Tell me about your work.
SB: My interest is in surveillance studies. That is a broad category and I approach it from various angles, even though I am trained as a sociologist. I look at creative works, literature and history to understand what happens when we put surveillance studies in conversation with Black studies. As surveillance studies developed post-9/11 — [around] interest in airports and borders and terrorism — there was an absence of how Black people experience, resist, and challenge surveillance. That’s where I think my work fits in. [Airports and borders] are also spaces of deportation, of containment, of deciding what bodies are risky, what bodies are trusted travelers, and how gender, race, and class create ideas around fear, belonging, and citizenship. Surveillance is the condition of Blackness in the United States. I was always interested in travel and movement, but 9/11 is when I became interested in biometric technology. Prior to that I was looking at immigration, and deportation. After 9/11, I started examining why are borders said to be more secure if we have passports, ID cards, and facial recognition. That’s such an exciting space to study: how the border operates.
NS: What are you most interested in within the field of surveillance studies?
SB: I am really interested in biometric technologies. [Today], we’re seeing so many important discussions around artificial intelligence, facial recognition used by police, or Apple, or IBM. These kind of public-private partnerships are often said to be about securing spaces, securing objects, and securing the nation. But what happens when certain faces are criminalized, or rendered illegible? What kind of calls are people making for algorithmic justice, or removing bias from algorithms? My interest is not really about being included in these datasets, or being properly read, but more so about questioning what these kinds of policing technologies are being used.
NS: Do you think surveillance is inherently bad?
SB: Depends on how one defines surveillance, who or what is doing the watching, sensing, or other forms of data collection and then what is done with it, because I find it very useful to monitor my blood pressure or track my daily steps. However when it comes to who most comes up against the business end of surveillance: people who are incarcerated, city life governed by the predictive policing of so-called “hot spots”, the Muslim ban, children held in ICE detention centers, or when states, schools and other institutions legislate what bathrooms transgender people can and cannot access — are all moments that demonstrate how integral surveillance is to a lot of oppression in contemporary life.
NS: How did you become a professor here at Yale?
SB: Maybe that’s a question of surveillance too, because I got an email. I didn’t know anything about it. I had actually been here a couple of years before; I gave a talk here in African-American Studies as part of their “Endeavor Series,” and I had come maybe the year before that to the Beinecke to look at some documents. But those were my only two times on the campus, so it was kind of a surprise to me. I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve met some amazing students here. I think the kind of questions that we raise in our class are so fruitful and important. There’s something unique about this space and the urgent questions that come through here. I know in my class we started discussing how can the past allow us to ask questions about our present. We’ve [also] talked about surveillance in transatlantic slavery and within the afterlife of slavery: what does it mean to go and look at the Thomas Thistlewood papers at the same time that Surviving R. Kelly is running on television in the nighttime?
It is [also] so amazing to be in a classroom that is mostly people of color. It has been so unique and not what I would have expected here. We can do wonderful things in that space like contend things while still respecting and honoring a political project.
NS: Why were you drawn to teaching?
SB: I always saw the classroom as a space for transformation, as a space of triage. [In teaching], no knowledge is neutral. The aims, the questions that I want to get to and what I want to leave the students thinking of are kind of tools. It’s a dialogue between the students and me. Our questions and concerns change [in response to] what’s happening in the world, but if I can leave them with thinking about the creative and intellectual work of artists practice as offering us maybe — I don’t necessarily think it’s hope — the methodologies to trouble some of the logics.
NS: Do you conceptualize the classroom as a place wherein social change can occur? And if so, how?
SB: Just us being here, in this space — particularly a space like here — I don’t know what to make of it, because it is social change. But we could also get recuperated into the system, too.
NS: Tell me about the exhibit you are curating at the University of Texas.
SB: That exhibit is for 2021. I haven’t really started yet. I have been able to be in conversation with artists, and through my book some artists have reached out to me. There are so many Black artists that have been thinking through and about surveillance. I think Black people have always been thinking through surveillance, and I think that’s what my work has been. I’m interested in how people are contending and disrupting surveillance, particularly artists. Having the category of Black women could be limiting and I’m trying to work through the politics of that but also there’s something to be said about Black women’s creative work.
NS: Any last thoughts? What do you think about the future of surveillance studies?
SB: That’s a big question. Of course people are doing important work now on artificial intelligence, drones used in warfare and for commercial purposes, electronic monitoring of people post-incarceration that extends the carceral state into people’s homes, and bias in machine learning. Maybe my contribution to that future of surveillance studies will be to continue to question what happens when Blackness enters the frame, meaning, for example, what’s going to happen when self-driving cars don’t see Black folks.
