Shifting Positionalities

Thank you very much for the opportunity to read and comment on your terrific book. Below you will find my reactions. The book is a terrific achievement and a wonderful contribution to resisting the dangerous expansion of surveillance and policing in all our lives. In the post-September 11, 2001 world, surveillance and policing have become pervasive, and yet mostly unexamined, parts of our lives—from ubiquitous security cameras and exhaustive airport searches to unprecedented levels of government wiretapping and surveillance of phone and web communications to the monitoring of library and financial records to the expansion of corporate surveillance of individual internet usage to the targeting of ethnic and religious minorities by police forces for observation, disappearance, and detention. Shifting Positionalities makes a critical contribution to documenting and understanding how these and other forms of surveillance and policing are shaping and damaging our lives and our society. Beyond the more obvious restriction of freedoms and rights, Viteri and Tobler's diverse collection of essays insightfully shows how practices of surveillance and policing are subtly influencing our thoughts about ourselves and others, reshaping ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, and national identities, deepening state and corporate control over our bodies, and contributing to the further marginalization and demonization of Muslims, Arabs, and others deemed to be "terrorist" threats. Encouragingly, Shifting Positionalities also reveals how the expansion of surveillance and policing has led to the invention of surprising forms of resistance to these forms of dangerous social control. Given the threat that surveillance and policing pose to basic democratic and human rights, Shifting Positionalities strikes an important blow against a new and increasingly insidious Big Brother.