Surveillance and privacy research is ready to go public at Queen’s.
The Surveillance Project was renamed the Surveillance Studies Centre on Oct. 22 after being granted provisional approval by Principal Daniel Woolf.
The name change must be formally approved by the University Senate by the summer of 2011.
“The switch to calling the project a centre is an acknowledgement of the project’s importance and it means it will be in a better position to receive funds from granting bodies,” Surveillance Studies Centre Director David Lyon said.
The centre is a research group on campus that studies the effects surveillance has on a citizen and the ways large corporations go about conducting it. There are two full-time staff and researchers from different faculties.
The difference between a project and a centre is that a centre is included in the organizational structure of the University, he said.
“The University sees the centre or institute as an entity that should be supported, so will list it among those for which external support from trusts, endowments and the like is sought,” he said.
The main funding for the project comes from a $2.5 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Lyon said.
Queen’s doesn’t contribute financially to the research.
“The University doesn’t support centres as far as I know,” Lyon said. “It assumes such units are self-financing.”
The name change will raise surveillance research’s profile, he said, adding that the change is timed with a series of public workshops and an art exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre planned for January.
This year’s focus is on video surveillance and closed circuit television, he said.
Lyon said surveillance research doesn’t only look at camera monitoring but includes studies into how personal data is attained, classified and categorized.
One of the research projects at the Centre looks at the various ways in which societies have become more transparent and visible to others, he said. There are students and faculty studying social media such as Facebook as well as those studying surveillance in conflict regions such as Gaza and the West Bank.
Aliya Kassam, ArtSci ’10, said she learned about the project when she took a sociology course in her third year.
“Surveillance shouldn’t be viewed a malevolent operation,” she said. “It’s a social reality.”
Kassam is writing an honours thesis on locational privacy at the centre, which she said is something like Google Street View.
She said she thinks the name change will contribute to raising the University’s profile internationally.
“At Queen’s there already exists a thriving community dedicated to surveillance research,” she said. “I think [the name change] will serve to contribute to ongoing efforts. … There will be increased recognition internationally and a broader research grid.”
—With files from Gloria Er-Chua
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